Kolkata, West Bengal, India
The ITC Green Centre in Kolkata is a 17-acre mixed-use development that serves as an urban anchor in the city’s rapidly expanding IT and real estate hub of Rajarhat.
The project integrates IT and corporate offices, a hotel, a knowledge centre, and residential towers while shaping a pedestrian-friendly environment.
ITC Green Centre by Morphogenesis Architecture Studio, won a 2025 Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design, and Urban Studies.
The architecture draws directly from Bengal’s cultural and environmental context—the cycle of its six seasons, a warm and humid climate, and an enduring ethos of community and belonging.
These principles inform every aspect of the design, from building orientation and landscape planning to spatial organisation and artistic expression.
All buildings are placed at an 18-degree tilt from the east–west axis, reducing solar exposure by roughly 25% and capturing prevailing southern winds.
These measures reduce perceived outdoor temperatures by up to 5°C, creating comfortable, naturally ventilated public spaces.
Vehicular movement is restricted to a peripheral loop, freeing the central spine to become a shaded, weather-protected pedestrian axis.
The office buildings are designed for high performance and adaptability.
A virtually column-free system delivers open floor plates with over 85% spatial efficiency.
Wings are shaped to ensure that nearly 90% of workspaces receive natural light without glare, with floor-plate depths limited to approximately 17 metres.
A regular 8.5-metre grid supports efficient planning for both offices and parking.
This modular approach enabled later reconfiguration of the first-phase towers as research facilities, illustrating the project’s capacity to accommodate evolving needs.
Sustainability is embedded in the building envelope and systems.
High-performance façades with external insulation, controlled window areas, and 450-mm-deep vertical stone fins reduce heat gain while maintaining daylight.
A radiant cooling system significantly lowers operational carbon and supports the project’s Platinum pre-certification under the Indian Green Building Council rating system.
The campus targets an energy consumption of approximately 43 kWh per square metre per year, well below typical commercial benchmarks in India.
Cultural identity forms another layer of sustainability, positioning the campus as a long-term, contextually rooted urban asset.
The eastern and western façades of the buildings act as a large-scale urban canvas.
Expansive sandstone panels—digitised, CNC-milled, and hand-finished by local artisans—depict motifs inspired by Bengal’s seasons, landscapes, and everyday life.
A participatory process informed the artwork, with contributions from artists and students across the region.
The knowledge centre’s façade features compositions of Bengali script inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, a collection of poems that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature, enriching the public realm through cultural expression.
The interiors extend these references through terracotta, graphic weaves, festival-inspired patterns, and materials rooted in local craft.
Together, these elements create a cohesive spatial experience that reflects community, seasonal rhythms, and regional traditions.
Now unfolding in phases, the development continues to evolve, aiming to highlight how contemporary architecture can meet global sustainability and performance standards while deriving a unique identity from local culture.
Project: ITC Green Centre
Architects: Morphogenesis Architecture Studio Pvt. Ltd.
Lead Architects: Sonali Rastogi and Manit Rastogi
Design Team: Nitin Bansal, Ipsita Hadke, Balaji Otra, Arnab Dutta, Sneha Sah, T A Vijayasanan, Apul Tandon, Katia Mossin, Swati Gautam, Sauren Banerjee, Piya Gupta, Kiran Yadav, Abhishek Arora, Aman Jain, Sugandha Chaudhary, Ravi Kumar, Mahafuj Ali, Pournima Kshirsaga, Sonali Rastogi, and Manit Rastogi
General Contractor: Larsen & Toubro
Client: ITC Private Limited
Photographers: Paul Raftery
