30,000 sq ft Neev Primary School in Bengaluru by Hundredhands

My name is Bijoy Ramachandran. I run a practice called 100 Hands with my wife Sunita, who's my partner as well. We have around 10 architects and we're currently working on a whole bunch of institutional buildings. Our practice is kind of hinged on this idea of context, on the notion that context of course is the stuff that's around us, and so observation before speculation, looking at things and sort of gleaning from their meanings for our work, but also more importantly context has an abstract idea in the sense of how maybe Louis Kahn describes the nature of things. We were invited to do this small primary school by a person called Kavitha Gupta Sabarwal. One of the nice things about it is that, you know, Kavitha has a very sophisticated idea about education, different from a lot of the regular schools. She thinks that a lot of the education happens outside of the classrooms. She wanted a building that had a lot of sort of interaction and participatory space. And so this was completely in line with the way that we thought of schools and education. And so in some sense it was the coming together of like-minded people and so the project is very dear to us because of that. So the school is kind of predicated on four fundamental ideas, if you will. The first idea of course is the idea that everybody talks about when thinking about a school and that's the idea of course the man under the tree, right, and this is the idea that Kahn talked about. So there's the wonderful tree, there's the guru sitting sort of, you know, and there are all his disciples, you know, sitting and listening to him and really not realizing that this is the guru and this is the learned man but just people, friends talking under that benign cover of the tree, you know, comfortably discussing things. The second idea was the idea of the map building and this is something that in the 1960s Alison Smithson sort of proposed this idea of an idea of the notion of a mat and a mat is just a grid, a matrix, if you will, and in that grid and the grid is defined either programmatically in terms of space or in terms of distances, in terms of time and this matrix was then, you know, plugged in with all of the programs that you needed for your university. So there's a wonderful example of this kind of building called the Berlin Open University which is just a framework or an armature of corridors which then gets plugged in with program and so these corridors then carry all of the services, they are the real life of this project. The third thing is really a reaction to the site itself and so I'm just going to sort of give you a sense of the site. So there's the site of the school and this is the site of the bigger building that, you know, we came to the site and this site was originally a coconut orchard and we were really interested of course we had to get rid of all of the coconuts because we wouldn't have any space to build the school if the coconuts remained but we wanted the memory of these coconuts to sort of come into play when we were designing it and so our idea was to create a building which was very articulated in terms of its section so it had a lot of terraces and, you know, places for people to meet and interact but hovering over this building which had all of these volumes was the memory of these coconuts, the grid of these coconuts still, you know, remembered in a steel frame above which hovered a very light metal canopy and so in some sense referring back to that first image of the man under the tree that this beautiful canopy would give you a wonderful benign environment in which kids can play and interact and that leads us to the fourth idea and the idea that of course the great Sanjay Mohey, our local architect here in Bangalore talks about essentially in almost all his projects the idea of participatory space where because of the way you articulate sections you feel completely connected so, you know, people standing and participating even visually because of the complexity of these sections that you get this wonderful sense of being part of a larger community visually and you get a sense of really being in an institutional space, a public space of some quality. So the man with the tree, people exchanging realizations, the idea of the map building, the orchard and its memory. So here's the site like we were describing with the trees and the orchard and that's the larger site and our building sort of sits within that site and faces really in this way that's where you enter the site and enter our building. So the front of the building and so I'm going to orient it in the same way there's the front of the building facing the big garden and then the access point at the distance. As you enter the building at the front is a veranda and that veranda is basically the public face of our building, it's an open space, it's got a low height and transitioning from the veranda into our building you have to pass through a channel of water. So you're passing across a channel of water through a very, very pronounced threshold and so all of the public facing functions of the school are beyond that water channel, the administration, the parents meeting rooms etc. and this large veranda that overlooks the play fields. The classroom which is a 600 square foot module, it seats around 25 kids and so that is the basic module of the plan. So if I was to lay out the grid, the grid actually responds to that dimension of the plan and so I'm just going to make a very quick sketch of the grid itself. Now having sort of made that grid, what you see is that you get these two sort of secondary grids here and they're actually places where gardens, water and other things sort of come into the plan and sort of start occupying the plan but the rest of the grid is occupied with these modules which are primarily the classroom. So there's three classrooms, there are three sections in each class and so the first standard kids are clustered around three, around a small intimate courtyard that is privately used by these three classrooms. It's got a small playground and a small area for outdoor activities and the second standard students again have a small cluster on the other end of the plan, again oriented around these three grids and around a small intimate garden which the three of them share. The centre of the plan is occupied by a library and a large open space which is double height and is really the congregational space of the school and on either side of that large congregational space are the two primary staircases that take you up and one of the staircases actually becomes an amphitheatre as well as you enter. So the staircases become more than just vertical circulation, they're places for people to sort of participate within that space. This is an open sort of veranda and this is an idea again taking you know from a lot of our local architects here, the idea that the south side of the plan is kept open and so all of the breezes coming from the south travel across that plan and out to the north and because of the water channel here you invariably get a lovely draft of cool wind as you come into this cool breeze that sort of flows through this building and hits you as you enter. So keeping the south open you're getting these kind of cross breezes across that plan and to the north. And now I'm just going to mark in blue the classrooms on the upper floor. So the strategy is very simple almost as if one was playing Minecraft and so you just staggered the location of these classrooms, I'm shifting out this classroom out to the front, I'm shifting this classroom on the upper floor back to this side and what we get then are places like courtyards and terraces that these classrooms can then enjoy as part of you know they're an extension of their space. And so too with this side, so again by shifting back this classroom I'm getting a terrace on the end here, keeping this classroom out in the back again shifting it out this way I get a terrace or a congregational space out in front here, this stays where it is and we didn't build anything on the front of this building above the admin and so all of this space is just a single story terrace which they use for all kinds of activities including yoga and they have some terrace gardens and vegetable gardens out here. So again just an idea that by simply shifting and maneuvering these program elements on the upper floor one is finding terraces and outdoor spaces for activities. The other thing that I wanted to just talk about a little bit was the idea of the section and the idea of this roof which is really the most important component of our building and so like one of the original sketches and that's the section of the building which is partially covered and partially open but this roof has a sort of saw tooth profile. It's a complete metal roof and so the idea is that up until this point of the building everything is made out of concrete and masonry and as the structure expresses itself beyond that point it all becomes steel. We had a wonderful engineer called Manjunath, BL Manjunath who designed all of that wonderful structure that hovers over this building. The roof itself is also made of steel. These south facing surfaces are all in tensile fabric, stretched fabric and the north sides are all in glass and so you get this light that comes in from the north and these triangular sort of truss profiles are covered with a yellow waterproof board and so what happens then is as the light filters through this roof you get a beautiful light within this space because of the choice of color up on top. And the ends of the roof have been covered with an expanded metal, a red expanded metal sheet, an aluminum sheet and that in a way sort of marks the north and south extremity of the grid. So working on Neve was a wonderful experience for us. We had a girl called Alka who started the project with us and sort of really shaped you know the general principles of what the project was about and we also had who's still with us a boy called Shrikant Shashi who spent a whole bunch of time at site really sort of making sure that because the project was done in six months flat it was really quick process. We had a wonderful project manager Desbil Cooper who really you know ran the project in an amazing way but I think in that some of our best things come under those sort of really stressful pressurized situations that you know very quickly we have to sort of come to conclusions about where we are headed and so on the one hand working with our team in the office and working under this really intense sort of schedule and on the other hand this engagement with the client that I was talking about earlier with Kavitha, one learns a lot through that kind of engagement making those conversations about what does it mean, what is education about not only for the project but also for our own growth as individuals I mean these sometimes with clients one learns so much and it improves your own sort of you know maturity and awareness of things. Nothing like a nice school to do to feel really satisfied and happy.