JDT Islam

Narratives

Educator Narrative

The institute has it legacy as the very first orphanage and charitable institute in the country. Started at the primary level, currently it caters to more than 5000 students enrolled in various programs.

The growth of the institute has been pretty haphazard through out it history of 75 years and there is precisely little could be done overnight as far as the quality of the campus is concerned. The scarcity of resources and disproportionate demand inevitably made the campus as an array of tacky buildings without any unifying character.

The new project presented an opportunity to the board to test the waters for future ideas of learning environments. The team hired to work on the project has an established precedence in coming up with ideas out of the box. The board approved the idea of ‘insertion’ to give a new direction for the whole learning experience to the student community as well to the educators.

The brief from the board was to have an experimental learning space, which would present an opportunity to the campus community and the governing body to assess the benefits and the value addition of alternative learning environments.

The project did take sometime to get approved as the design presented by the architects was something the board had never come across, but the idea of ‘insertion’ triggered the interest as the campus was badly in need of some thing imaginative.

The finished project not only respected the tight and unfavorable budget the board had in hand but took the realm of learning spaces beyond the recognizable and established models. It is a unique space, something no one would have encountered in a school- a pro-active learning space as opposed to the conventional, drab back drops.

The project has three major impacts on the campus community.

1)The space made the learning fun and non-hierarchical and the teachers who have been used to the hierarchical mode of disseminating knowledge could immediately see the difference.

2)The students found space as challenging, a place where they discover a new experience every other day and the only space they could territorialize and relate to instantly in the whole campus, unlike, say their dorm, which is territorialized out of sheer forced and repeated use.

3)The institute could position the new facility in such way to get additional affiliations and associations with other institutes and universities, which opened up new opportunities and courses.

The project delivered the desired result of creating an innovative learning space, but most importantly it immensely raised the awareness among all concerned of the vital connection between the ritual of learning and the environment in which the knowledge is shared.

What exemplary ideas do the designs contain that enhance learning?

Traditional Class rooms The design strives to generate an altogether different model for learning spaces. It started as a speculative exercise- for that matter, all good architecture are pure speculation of spaces. The design created various domains in the space, which generate territorial instincts in the children.

Transparency The design relies on layered transparency. The level of transparency / opaqueness depends on angle of view or the position of the user in the space.

It is a highly orchestrated and carefully designed effect. Some are of course purely accidental, highlighting the speculative nature of space making. We invent a new space or a pattern each time we visit the project.

The visual connectivity helps the teachers to monitor the students at the basic functional level.

The Wraps are suspended from the ceiling making them appear to float in the space resulting in another level of transparency across the floor level in the space.

Interior & Exterior Vistas The space is conceived as a palimpsest, with shifting patterns like in kaleidoscope - that also without having any mobile elements in the space. Each encounter is a discovery
not to be repeated until one could exactly trace the vector in the space.

What innovations in the planning, programming and design process supported the realization of those exemplary ideas?

W R A P 3
S P A T I A L PA L I M S E S T S

Wrap-3 refers the chronology of the projects, in which the architects have employed the concept of ‘non-hierarchical tectonic imagery’ in their projects.

The project is a computer training centre in an orphanage in a remote village in India, meant to impart the basics of modern education to the orphaned young children from poor families around the near by region.

Wrap-3 is an ‘insertion’ in an existing large campus to revitalize the institute and a set as a model / blue print for future actions / decisions. The design explores the potentials of an experiential and territorial environ as pro-active learning space, contrary to the standard, functionally derived classrooms.

The design veers away from the dogma of ‘rational modernist’ approach for a design process, which favors accidental discoveries / encounters as much as the rationally / theoretically derived spaces.

The space is conceived as a series of ‘wraps’ creating unique territorial domains, juxtaposed to create overlapping palimpsests of color, spatial overlays and derived / accidental ‘readings’. Further it explores potentials of color for spatial definition and defining territorial behaviors in the end users.

The project also attempts to take the class room out of the drab Cartesian coordinates of the conventional teaching environs, to an evocative, penetrating and challenging environ, which never ceases to conjure up surprises in the young minds as they encounter the space daily.

The target group (Students of Primary & Secondary School), made the design process lean heavily on child perception, creating a wholly informal teaching environment that they could relate to.

The cut outs on the wrap are ‘corrected’, intuitive, childish doodles that double up as a ‘crawl / graffiti’ on the wall as well as an integral architectural element / iconography

The design, in part deals with the dichotomy of perception — On the higher level it is the simple reading on the plan Vs a highly complex ‘three dimensional construct’ and at the basic perceptive level as a continuous changing ‘spatial kaleidoscope’ generating unique spatial compositions with every changing position in the space. Each encounter with the space is a discovery, prodding the young minds to explore, dream and conjure.

The whole mass is anchored from the top, leaving the entire space clear of any visual obstructions at the floor level. The work tops on either side are divided by 12thk clear float glass at the bottom resulting in a levitating spatial matrix.

Besides the inventive architectural approach, the program tackled the cost efficiency as the very fact that it was designed for an orphanage. So was the recurring maintenance cost, and the artificial lighting was restricted to the most essential as the centre is operational only during the day time.