U.B. Poornima, the first resident architect of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), remembers what the campus was like in 1994 when she first landed there.
“The compound wall construction was already done, and a sump was being laid,” she recalls. But the land, back then, was barren, a far cry from today’s bustling, verdant campus. “Only snakes were seen crawling around,” she says at “Building (for) Biology: The NCBS Campus”, an event that consisted of a historical campus walk, followed by a talk that delved into the genesis of the institute and its campus.
Nostalgia and memory, often tinctured with humour, repeatedly made their way into this event, part of a public lecture series regularly held by the Archives at NCBS that sought to “understand the environment built for doing science, how space shapes the culture of science, and how science, too, is shaped by the space it inhabits,” as the event’s invitation put it, adding that the campus walkthrough is an experiment in seeing the space as a historical site.
The National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain
Insights and changes
Peppered with insights from these campus members and enlivened by questions from curious audience members, the walk ended up becoming a freewheeling discussion on various aspects of the campus, ranging from the rationale behind the lovely view of the lawns at the Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines to how the pond on campus became one, about the first set of buildings designed by the Delhi-based architect Raj Rewal and the curious case of how the Godrej locks in campus housing could once be opened with a single key (a mistake that was rectified).
“A lot of changes have happened since we moved into the campus … people grew, space grew, a lot more occupants in the building,” says Poornima, while T.M. Sahadevan, who served as the first administrative officer at NCBS, lingers on the somewhat serendipitous origins of the campus.
Participants of the “campus walkthrough” during a tour of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain
“There were a lot of problems,” he says, recalling how when the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) first approached the government of Karnataka, wanting to set up NCBS in Bengaluru, they were told that no more expansion in Bengaluru was possible since Hosur was already putting a load on Bangalore back then.
“Then someone suggested that we ask GKVK,” he says, adding that this came through. “We got 20 acres of land and took over in February,” remembers Sahadevan, the first TIFR person to set foot on campus back in 1991.
Admittedly, the event was somewhat unstructured, unearthing the memories and lived experiences of some of its past and present campus members rather than a linear building biography. Still, it succeeded in leaving attendees more enlightened (and often amused) by the end.
The National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain
A 25-year-old history
According to the NCBS website, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) has been directly or indirectly responsible for forming at least six research institutions in the country, of which NCBS is one.
While the initial proposal made in 1982, following a suggestion made by Prof. S. Ramaseshan, the then Director of the Indian Institute of Science, was to have a joint TIFR-IISc Centre on the IISc campus, this did not reach fruition. Then, in 1984, the Planning Commission agreed to fund a centre for fundamental research in biological sciences at Bangalore, functioning as “an autonomous unit under the aegis of TIFR and conduct fundamental research and teaching in areas of biology at the frontiers of knowledge,” as the website notes. The next few years were spent scouting for an appropriate place to set up, culminating in this 20-odd-acre campus leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences, with an MOU signed in 1991.
While NCBS technically celebrated its 25th anniversary in October 2016 since it spent its first few years at the TIFR Centre at the Indian Institute of Science Campus before moving to its current location, people began trickling in by 1998 or so.
“Depending on who you speak to, people have been living in this space for around 25 years,” says Venkat Srinivasan, who heads the Archives at NCBS, at the talk that followed the campus walk. Though he agrees it is only a rough estimate, he adds, “It is a good moment to reflect on the physical space that you inhabit daily.”
The National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain
Extraordinarily particular
In this talk, augmented by audio interviews, old photographs, documents and interjections by the faculty members who were also part of the audience, Srinivasan traced the institute’s genesis and growth over the last two and a half decades. From an audio clip of an interview with Obaid Siddiqi, the co-founder and first director of NCBS, that reflects on the idea of NCBS to documents detailing the nitty-gritty aspects of lease and construction and old photographs reflecting the barrenness of the land before the institute came into being, the talk’s biggest takeaway was this. “How extraordinarily particular this group of individuals were at getting what they wanted,” he puts it.
Poornima, who was deeply entrenched in the construction process right from the start, is wont to agree. In most government institutions, she points out, the final users of the buildings, too busy with their research, give the architects instructions in one go, which goes on to be developed by the latter. In this case, however, the users were deeply involved in the process from the start to the finish. “They took away time from research and were involved at every stage,” she remembers. “They knew what they wanted.”
