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Every architect tackling the design of a kindergarten, school, or campus aims to offer young people not only a disciplinary program ensuring educational achievement but also a place that nurtures eagerness to learn, enables socialization, and provides the seclusion needed for study. The theme of the project dealt with here can be contextualized by comparing it to several other school complexes designed by contemporary architects. One example is the Forest Kindergarten by junya.ishigami+associates in Shandong, China, whose architecture is inspired by the forest to bring children into direct contact with the natural environment. Similarly, the El petit comte kindergarten by RCR in Besalú (near Girona, Spain) stands out for its child-friendly spaces and the use of color as a perceptive and educational tool. The common feature of both these projects is their permeable spatial logic. The interiors are a sequence of uninterrupted space to be traversed and experienced gradually. While this principle only needed to be developed on a single horizontal level in these two schools, the City Pride School, designed by Indian firm A Threshold, faced a stiffer challenge. Not only is permeability developed horizontally, it also had to be pursued vertically in a building that fits with the extension and layout of the surrounding urban context. Located in the newly developed areas of Ravet Pradhikaran, Pune, the school is part of a compact, vertical urban fabric, where space is scarce and land values accordingly high, making a six-story school building necessary.
A careful look at the cross-sectional architectural drawings helps understand the complex articulation of the building as a whole and the importance of the central core as the project’s key compositional factor. The school is designed in such a way that its overall height of six floors is never perceived. From the outside, its compact forms blend with the rest of the neighborhood. Inside, however,...
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