Bengaluru’s Harrow School Wins World’s Best Designed School Award

New Delhi, September 24, 2025: Selected from over 550 entries across 49 countries, Harrow International School, Bengaluru, designed by CP Kukreja Architects, has been recognised as one of the Winners in the Architecture – Educational Buildings category at the LOOP Design Awards 2025. This international honour underscores the project’s contribution to advancing institutional design by interweaving heritage, ecology, and pedagogy. The LOOP Design Awards, based in Portugal, is an international platform celebrating innovation and excellence in architecture, interiors, and product design. The 2025 edition highlighted exemplary works from leading practices worldwide, with Harrow International School, Bengaluru, standing out within this highly competitive field.

Harrow’s first campus in India extends the legacy of a 450-year-old institution into the Indian subcontinent, reinterpreting its classical identity within the ecological and cultural setting of Bengaluru. The campus is structured around a preserved natural water channel that becomes both a landscape feature and a spatial organiser. Academic, residential, cultural, and athletic facilities are arranged in dialogue with courtyards, shaded pathways, and landscaped spines, fostering a continuum between built form and environment.

“Education is as much about the spaces in which it unfolds as it is about the curriculum it imparts. At Harrow International School Bengaluru, architecture becomes a catalyst for learning, where a preserved creek, courtyards, and walkways create an environment that inspires curiosity and community. This global recognition affirms our belief that schools must nurture not only academic excellence but also a deeper awareness of culture, ecology, and the responsibilities of citizenship in a changing world,” says Harrow International School Governing Body Chairman Aseem Chauhan.

Reflecting on the recognition, Managing Principal, CP Kukreja Architects, Dikshu C. Kukreja remarked: “Architecture for education must do more than provide infrastructure; it must cultivate imagination, community, and resilience. At Harrow International School, Bengaluru, we sought to craft a milieu where heritage and modernity converse, where sustainability is embedded in every gesture, and where the built environment itself becomes a teacher. This award reaffirms the responsibility of architecture to shape futures, not just buildings.”

The masterplan positions the creek as a unifying thread, bridges, shaded walkways, and green spines extend across its course, ensuring that the natural water system is not hidden but celebrated as an active part of campus life. Academic, residential, cultural, and athletic facilities are thus arranged in dialogue with courtyards, shaded pathways, and the flowing creek, creating a continuum between built form and environment.

The design reimagines Harrow’s iconic brick architecture through locally sourced materials and draws from Bengaluru’s tradition of palaces, gardens, and lakes. A 30-metre clock tower emerges as both a symbolic anchor and an infrastructural innovation, consolidating building services within a vertical core and thereby reducing the ecological footprint.

The campus integrates bioswales, pedestrian networks, and north-south orientation of blocks to optimise daylight and ventilation. Passive strategies embedded in the masterplan, from shaded arcades to internal courtyards that buffer heat gain complement high-performance systems, while water-sensitive planning ensures complete on-site rainwater management. These principles have been recognised with a USGBC Platinum rating, affirming the project’s role as a benchmark for sustainable educational environments.

The LOOP Design Awards is an international platform celebrating innovation and excellence in architecture, interiors, and product design. The 2025 edition highlighted exemplary works from leading practices worldwide, with Harrow International School, Bengaluru, standing out within this highly competitive field.