‘The Silicon Valley of India,’ Bangalore is the epicentre of the rapid IT and financial  development that India prides itself on today. It is only fitting that UNStudio, an internationally acclaimed architecture, urban, product & interior design studio, has created the Karle Town Centre, a development that aims to define Bangalore locally and inspire the whole of India to ‘lead by example’ when designing future urban destinations.

UNSense – the arch tech company founded by UNStudio – is collaborating with Karle Infra to curate the use of sensorial technologies throughout the development. This will help make the built environment more responsive and healthy, by tailoring the environmental controls to the users physical, mental and social wellbeing through data collection. Illustrations of this are the controlling of heat gain through thermal buffering, reducing unwanted wind and filtering the air from fine particulates that have been lifted from the soil. Furthermore, large underground water retention zones are used for the irrigation of onsite vegetation and the storage and treatment of grey water use.

Currently under construction, Karle Town Centre enjoys a direct connection to the city’s ring road arterial and expanding metro lines. It is positioned next to the established Manyata Tech Park, with scenic views over Nagavara Lake, and is designed to act as a natural magnet for people and activities in the urban panorama.

The contemporary landscape and architectural language complement each other and together shape the elements of the urban environment—from the design of the planter edges, to the architectural features found in the landscape, which merge and blend with the green pockets of the building facades.

The studio has also collaborated with BALJON Landscape Architects from Amsterdam, to envision a sustainable and resilient landscape plan. The aim is to reinvent the historic reputation of Bangalore as the ‘Garden City’ for the 21st century. The lake front promenade, adequate streetscape and avenue vegetation, and the implementation of semi-public vegetative sky gardens throughout the architecture are some of the ways in which they seek to fulfil this objective.