Chandigarh, April 15 -- Imagine a cake flipped by accident, only for the decorator to realise it looks better upside down. Well, that's quite the origin story of Panjab University's iconic Student Centre. Standing tall as an inverted circular structure at the heart of the campus, the building's legendary silhouette was born not from a blueprint, but a serendipitous mistake.

As the university celebrates the 100th birth anniversary of its chief architect, BP Mathur, his former colleague Joga Singh, now an octogenarian, revealed the secret behind the structure. Mathur had originally designed the building inspired by ziggurat architecture-a stepped, pyramid-like structure where layers decrease in size toward the top.

However, during a plann...