Almost all of us have been here in our childhood, and perhaps the closest memories we hold dear are not of significant events, but ironically of the insignificant ones. Of losing oneself to wonderment, to wander under the skies, to relive in our vivid imaginations of the make-believe and many more phrases that make the song of our lives.
This is the premise on which we began to design the spaces of the school at Bhadran, where a child spends his formative years, where his first friends are made, where his first memories are etched. This evolved as a quilt of many small events, of small places and spaces, to hide, to collide, climb, roll, run into and out of, to satiate curiosities of a forming mind, allowing its idyllic imagination and wonder.
Conceptualized from a child’s early scribbles that turned into a series of dancing arches, the school is an experiment with materials and forms.
The asymmetry of the arches reiterates that it is not always mandatory to be conventional.The building echoes the habit of critical thinking, questioning, and breaking away from the norm; even its irregular plan is designed to allow for a meander.
Set on plot of land, surrounded by tobacco fields in the town of Bhadran, the design of the school grew organically as a series of classrooms that dance their way through the trees; encountering alcoves, projections, niches, inhabited bridges, boxes and mezzanines – adding to a composition of experiences that would weave into the fabric of the school, akin to the maze-like town of Bhadran itself.
The entire school is designed as a sequence of modules; each module would have a pair of classrooms and a corridor, with its tilted vaults sinuously strung.All the modules are designed to create repeated use of shuttering material made in waste steel and can be arranged in meandering patterns as deemed fit. The vaults are a sandwich structure with concrete in between layers of brick on the top and bottom. The classrooms have irregular jack arches. The roof is waterproofed with a thick layer of brickbat coba in the profile of the arches forming a playful broken brick landscape even on the roof.
We have stayed true to one material: terracotta – bricks and only bricks in walls, floors, and roofs. Sourced from a kiln close to the site, it is the love of labor from around the town and the craft they bring with themselves that lends the building its immaculate semantic and precision.
Light is a tangible building material andwe use it like a needle to embroider moments and experiences in the architecture – establishing an architecture of intrigue. A building; a school; where the play of hiding and seek is perpetual.
Location: Bhadran, Gujarat
Typology: Educational
Area: 18000 sq.ft
