Imagine a traditional Indian stepwell drawn by M.C. Escher and large enough to accommodate 9,000 people. Now envision it as a landscaped building. That’s exactly what architect Sanjay Puri created for Prestige University’s 32-acre campus outside the city of Indore, about 360 miles northeast of Mumbai. His new poured-concrete structure—which is clad in local clay brick and shielded from the sun by perforated GFRC screens—rises 92 feet in a series of 463 green roofs and paved terraces connected by small sets of stairs. To bring daylight inside, Puri cut about a dozen courtyards of different sizes from the mass of the 332,000-square-foot project. An indoor street runs diagonally through the building—slicing through volumes of different heights and offering spatial surprises. “The image of a stepwell had been in my mind for a long time,” says Puri, “since it not only served an essential function—storing water in a dry climate—but was an important social gathering place.”