The APWCT School, tucked away from the city buzz in a semi-urban area Melmaruvathur was designed with a sense of locality and as a user-centric design. The school creates a dialogue with the surroundings of the site, as the team produced a building for the modern era which manages to also remain firmly rooted in the vernacular traditions of India’s past.
Designing a school is always exciting and challenging at the same time, since it is about dealing with the energy of children of different age groups, from nursery kids to adolescent teens. Each age group has specific psychological and physical needs which have implications on architecture and conceiving of spaces.
While designing schools, architecture offers immense potential and freedom, which also needs to be accompanied by understanding and observations on how children use and experience space through the years which we have tried to integrate in this school.
There are also different kinds of needs and curiosities that have to be met - to allow the young child to try and catch a ray of sunlight in their hands, for older children to have space for studying alone or in group, spaces for individual teaching.
The main objective was to create a connect between the green spaces and the built-up, to bring the children closer to the nature. An interplay of light and shadows was achieved with large openings and brick screen walls. The provision for natural light into each classroom has facilitated in making the building a sustainable design. The classrooms are placed around central courtyards which introduces green spaces into the built environment and also favours in maintaining the thermal comfort by inducing stack effect. All the spaces are naturally ventilated and lit.
The corridors act as interaction spaces apart from connecting the different blocks. The corridors were designed to make them look joyful. There is a play of volume and light along the corridor.The corridors weave through the spaces connecting through the spaces in a linear fashion, with the courtyards visually breaking the linearity and forming buffer zones by bringing in the green spaces. Informal seating in the courtyards make the entire building lively.
On the whole with its unique architecture ,the classroom block connects and communicates with the students in a way which will create a lasting impression in their journey of life.