"Iskcon approached us to design a low-cost ecological housing for their new school’s teachers. Using alternative techniques was a pre-requisite in the design brief. The budget of 1 cr was fixed, and we had to work within the available resources. "

The school campus is near a beautiful village, accessed through a meandering single lane road. The building site is amongst the cast farmlands lined with vegetation, the natural color palette of the surrounding is earthy and green.

The concept was to create a PLACE.

Places are fusions of human and natural order and are the significant immediate centers of our experiences of the world. They are defined less by unique locations, landscape, and designs than by focusing of experiences and intentions onto particular settings. Places are not abstractions¬¬¬¬ or concepts, but are directly experienced phenomena of the lived world and hence are full with meanings, with real objects, and with ongoing activities. They are important sources of individual and communal identity and are often profound centers of human existence to which people have deep emotional and psychological ties.

This central space acts as an outdoor room, like an extension of houses surrounding it. With the sky above and grass underneath, its scale surprises you. Once you are in the middle of this space, it feels like a stage and the fenestrations on the internal façade become the eyes of audience to the drama of everyday life.

From this community space, one moves into an individual entrance court before entering the actual private sanctuary of house. The varying degree of privacy controlled through movement and design elements is the concept which cohesively unites the entire built form.

The individual court doesn’t have a roof; it is the least private space of the individual house. Then you arrive into the living room through a 6”level difference and two brick piers, no wall. This room has a higher degree of privacy from the entrance courtyard, but lesser than the kitchen and bedrooms. Once you cross the living room then we enter the innermost sanctum of the house which moves to the highest level of privacy.

If one analyses the elevation, it becomes obvious that all the load transfer is happening through red burnt bricks; and the SMB is the infill material. It was a calculated design decision, because using bricks was turning out to be more economical than making SMB of recommended compressive strength. Borrowing the colors from the surroundings, we decided to use both the materials, punctuating the SMB façade with brick arches and piers. The vibrant red colors of burnt bricks with muted muddy grey mud blocks beautifully complement each other.

We were also assigned to design the main gate of the campus, this gate was supposed to be a symbol of perseverance, humility and faith, not sticking like a sore thumb into the horizon of the neighboring village.

Using red brick became was obvious choice as it is a locally available and very humble material. In order to reduce the amount of concrete and steel, we decided to construct a brick arch spanning 25metres across the road. The inspiration was architect Nari Gandhi’s style of work.

Structurally it was a challenging to balance the forces without using concrete. The two towers were erected on more than 100 sand pile foundations. These towers act as a buttress to counter the outward thrust of this huge arch. They also double up as guard rooms for entry and exit. The canopy on top designed as light weight truss to minimize the load.