Becoming Aligned With All: A Rammed Earth Campus in Sri Lanka That Rises From the Ground and Falls Back

Read the initials of the title and you get BAWA. That is the first clue that this proposal is less a building than an argument with a legacy: how do you honour Geoffrey Bawa's tropical modernism without photocopying it? The answer offered here is a single gesture, stated plainly on the boards: the ground lifts up, becomes a roof, and drops back down to become ground again.

Becoming Aligned With All is the work of Hani Mansurnejad, Mandana Khalessi and yavar moshiri. Set on a riverside plot in Sri Lanka, it imagines a centre for design education organised as a learning zone and a community zone beneath two sweeping shells. The project was Shortlisted at Reclaiming Modernity.

Two Shells That Peel Off the Site and Fold Back Into It

The design process diagram is disarmingly literal. Step one is a flat site; step two pulls two strips of that surface upward into arches; step three twists the surfaces so they face the edges of the plot. From the riverside path, the result reads as a pair of white ribbons lifting off the lawn, cresting over the rooms, and sliding back into the grass at the far end. The neighbouring pitched roofs stay low and red, so the shells register as landscape rather than as another house on the street.

That contrast is the project's strongest card. Instead of a box with a deep overhang, the roof itself is the topography. It is a bold reading of tropical modernism, one that treats Bawa's sheltering roofs as something that can grow straight out of the ground.

A Courtyard Drawn as a Reflection of the River

Between the two shells, the team reshaped the courtyard into a wave-like pool, described on the boards as a reflection of the river running along the site. It is not only symbolic. The middle pool is meant to collect rainwater into a tank and release the surplus into the river, a direct response to the floods and heavy rains the team identifies as a threat to Sri Lankan towns. Strips of lawn run across the plot and through the building, alternating with paving, so the ground plane stays striped and porous rather than sealed.

The bird's eye view makes the planning logic legible: the shells sit diagonally across a square plot, the pooled void at the centre, the greenery bands stitching the open ground to the surrounding gardens. Benches and seating are folded out of the same surfaces, so furniture becomes another small rise and fall of the ground.

Rammed Earth Piers Beneath a White Concrete Sweep

The material pairing is deliberate: white concrete as the voice of modernity, rammed earth as the voice of context. At ground level, rammed earth panels sit between slender white columns under a cantilevered slab, with the arched shell and its curtain wall rising behind. The earth walls are perforated with small holes to let air move through and keep humidity in check, while section B-B traces breezes passing between and through the volumes.

The team argues for rammed earth on practical grounds too: soil taken from the site saves money, and after a catastrophe the walls can be rebuilt from the same ground. It is a convincing position, and the render shows the warm earth panels doing real work against the glare of the concrete. Precast concrete for the shells and an ancient wall technique below make the old and the new legible side by side, exactly the juxtaposition the team credits to Bawa.

Open Ground Under the Curve

The plans divide the programme into two compact clusters: design studios, library, computer lab and administration in the learning zone; flexible workshops and performance spaces in the community zone. Interior walls are moveable panels, and terraces are paired with moveable curtain walls so rooms can open outward. Beneath the shells, roofed but wall-free areas host performance and collaborative uses with furniture that has no fixed place. Here the project is most persuasive as a building for changing users, yet the enclosed rooms remain tightly packed in two corners of a large site.

Nikhil Mohan, who judged the competition, recognised the strength of the idea while pressing on exactly that compactness and on how far the material strategy goes:

you have a good concept of rising from the earth and falling back to earth, could have developed the concept in a much better way. Presentation plays a big role in bringing forth a concept and design.
the rooms could have been more spread out to create more interesting spaces, thus have a good transition between indoor and outdoor. The use of more sustainable materials is required in the design to justify the concept of rising from the earth and falling back to earth.Nikhil Mohan, Principal architect, Thought parallels architecture, Calicut, India

Why This Project Matters

Becoming Aligned With All shows how far a single, honest concept can carry a scheme. The rise and fall of the ground shapes the roof, the courtyard, the furniture and even the logic of materials that come from the site and can return to it. In a region facing floods and rising rivers, a building designed to be rebuilt from its own soil is more than a poetic gesture.

Its open questions are just as instructive. Spreading the rooms beneath the shells and leaning harder on earth over concrete would push the concept from image toward lived experience, binding interior and courtyard more tightly. Even as it stands, the proposal makes a clear case that reclaiming modernity means drawing the roof out of the land itself, not borrowing a style.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Hani Mansurnejad, Mandana Khalessi, yavar moshiri

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Reclaiming Modernity

Jury

Nikhil Mohan, Principal architect, Thought parallels architecture, Calicut, India

Location

Sri Lanka

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.