KEO International Consultants has designed a new 27,000-sq-m university for Kuwait Institute for Science and Technology that will accommodate 1,500 students.

Central to the concept of the campus is the circulation concourse introduced as a three-storey atrium connecting the various programme elements, with sufficient daylight filtering in through its sides.

Programme component wings housing the administration, academic faculty, classrooms, academic support, laboratories and the graduate programmes have been placed in a parallel arrangement at various nodal points along the concourse based on functional adjacencies. They are separated by open-ended landscaped courtyards creating shaded and controlled outdoor environments.

The developer of the estimated $38-million project is Company of Science and Technology.

Design director at KEO International Consultants Raj Patel said: “The inspiration for the project stemmed from the site’s natural desertscape located outside the urban fabric of the city. The natural and contextual phenomenon of continuously shifting and realigning furrows in the sand formed by the movement of wind is reflected in the striation of forms and organisation of the design.”

The entire campus has been appropriately coloured in sand tones emphasising a horizontal movement similar to the shifting plane of the desert landscape.