British Council

Located in the heart of New Delhi, the British Council building occupies a singular place in the city’s cultural and intellectual life. Conceived through the collaboration of Howard Hodgkin, Charles Correa, and Mahendra Raj, it has long served as a point of access to learning, language, and the arts, while also carrying a distinctive architectural identity marked by Hodgkin’s celebrated banyan tree mural. The redesign approaches this legacy with care, treating the building not as a shell to be replaced, but as a living institution to be reinterpreted.

The project is grounded in adaptive reuse. As patterns of research and learning shifted from physical collections to digital access, the original spatial model no longer fully served its purpose. Rather than erasing that history, the intervention reworks the existing structure into a more flexible and multi-layered environment that accommodates culture, education, networking, and work in equal measure. Library areas now operate as convertible spaces for collaboration and gathering, while contemporary workplace strategies such as hot-desking, hoteling, and remote working are integrated into the larger institutional framework.

A 180-seat auditorium equipped for both instruction and performance extends the building’s cultural role, while interiors draw on regionally sourced materials, reclaimed wood, recycled content, and biophilic elements to create a more tactile and sustainable environment. Sensor-based lighting and other efficiency measures support this environmental agenda, which culminated in a LEED Platinum rating under the Commercial Interiors category, the first such certification for any British Council worldwide.

What emerges is a rare institutional retrofit: one that honours memory, responds intelligently to changing patterns of use, and gives an established cultural landmark renewed relevance for the present.