National Institute Of Public Finance & Policy – New Delhi
Year : 1979 – 1982
Location: New Delhi
Description:
The NIPF is primarily an academic institution, engaged in both research and training programmes in the realms of public finance and fiscal policy. The design concept takes into account the necessity for three different components: academic spaces, hostel facilities and residences. The three functions have been integrated into a complex that has a hierarchy of internal and external open spaces.
All the exterior wall surface have been covered with a buff colour sandstone. To enrich this exterior texture, the knobs, which serve to tie the sandstone to the wall panels, have been left visible and covered with a sandstone grit.
Raj Rewal : Innovative Architecture and Tradition
The Architecture of Raj Rewal
Kenneth Frampton
Faced in pale yellow sandstone, the National Institute of Public Finance & Policy enabled Rewal to arrive at a more civic syntax for a generic urban institution grouped about a central square. This entire four-storey, ‘city-in-miniature’, divides into three distinct entities — an academic block, a hostel and a series of terrace houses. Where the academic sector comprises a triple-height library, an auditorium plus classrooms and offices, grouped about four sides of the court, the hostel and the terrace housing were to be dispersed across the site as a staggered, yet partially symmetrical network, adjoining the academic block. The last of these receives the most monumental expression, with its tall, blank, windowless masses and the all but Kahnian character of its pin-wheeling symmetrical façades. These features are clad in carefully coursed sandstone panels, running vertically across the concealed floor slabs of the concrete frame and studded throughout, à la Otto Wagner, with matching pre-cast concrete dowels that assist in securing the stone panels to the structural backing.
Bibliography:
- Techniques et Architecture (Paris), June/July 1984
