International design, architecture, and planning firm Perkins Eastman recently joined Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, dignitaries from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) in Nagpur, Maharashtra, for the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new, ground-up AIIMS Nagpur campus [click to watch video]. The formal ceremony was held on 14 April 2017. The 150-acre campus comprises healthcare, academic, and residential zones to create a holistic environment that reinforces AIIMS’s position as India’s premier medical sciences institution. Perkins Eastman, together with the India firm Edifice Consultants, is designing the entire development, estimated for completion in 2020.

AIIMS is a group of autonomous medical institutes of higher education that currently has seven functioning campuses throughout the country. The Nagpur campus will be located in the MIHAN (Multi-modal International Cargo Hub and Airport at Nagpur) project, establishing the first AIIMS presence in Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state. The mixed-use healthcare campus and its care facilities are being designed to accommodate enormous outpatient demand, thus AIIMS Nagpur is projected to eventually serve a population of 365 lakhs (or 36.5 million) from the Maharashtra’s eastern and southern regions of Vidarbha and Marathwada, respectively.

The Nagpur campus adopts a unique urban form and will comprise a mix of uses and building types, including new healthcare, academic, and residential complexes, knit together by comprehensive landscaping—befittingly including an orange grove—and infrastructure, along with carefully considered transit and pedestrian circulation plans. The development vision for the entire campus and its sub-components will be carried out simultaneously.  

In order to accommodate the future growth and expansion needs of the campus, the formal planning approach utilizes geometric concepts of flexibility and modularity. The main component of the campus is the medical zone, which will feature a 960-bed hospital and connected outpatient building that will incorporate best practices in evidence-based design and patient-centered care. This zone is seamlessly stitched to the academic quad in order generate rich inter-professional relationships, while the latter also aims to generate active learning environments through student-centric and technology-rich spaces, including simulation-based medical teaching and learning. The residential units were designed for privacy and include social spaces that foster kinship and a co-working spirit.

Managed by Supriya Thyagarajan, Associate Principal and Office Director of the firm’s Mumbai office, the Perkins Eastman team comprises design leaders and building-type experts from seven offices—Charlotte, Dubai, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC—illustrating the firm’s global capacity to deliver a project of this scale, schedule, and programmatic complexity.

The AIIMS Nagpur campus is one of three comprehensive AIIMS campuses Perkins Eastman is designing and planning in partnership with Edifice Consultants. The other two, AIIMS Kalyani in the state of West Bengal, and AIIMS Guntur in the state of Andhra Pradesh, are projected to begin construction shortly and will further expand the reach of India’s premier medical colleges to parts of the country not currently served by these“institutes of national importance.”