Excerpt: Hilltop School Bright Horizon Academy by DesignAware features the transformation of a charity-run school into bright and fun spaces that encourage learning and growth. The design engulfs the rocks within it, creating informal spaces for discussion, reading, and group learning alongside structured classrooms. Skylights and voids bring in light and air, and pops of color contrast the gray, fostering a playful yet robust educational environment.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] A zakat-run school that had been functioning out of a large makeshift warehouse for four years finally raised enough funds for a building. The site is located on a hilltop, in the unplanned settlement within the walls of the majestic Golconda Fort in Hyderabad. The project was riddled with multiple challenges: a tight budget (as it is run by a charitable educational trust), a highly contoured, rocky site (a topographic trait of the Deccan Plateau), a dense urban context, and Heritage Zone regulations.
The existing school was a large hall with partitions for classrooms, and was a very dark, cramped and uninspiring space, not at all how a school should be, but unfortunately, how charity schools generally are. We wanted to design bright and fun spaces, which would encourage learning and growth. We also aimed to preserve the openness of the playground by not building over it, which is a rare green lung space in the heart of the low-rise, high-density, unplanned neighborhood. Students were conditioned to informal learning under trees and over boulders, and we wanted the school to provide space for similar activities alongside a structured learning environment.
Articulating the peculiar and difficult topography of the site and its surrounds posed a major challenge due to proximity to heritage structures and tight urban context, most of which is residential courtyard houses with shared walls. The 250 million-year-old natural rock heritage and the 800+ year old built heritage of the fort add to the beauty of the project. The site itself was naturally sectioned into two parts by a cliff, forming a wall of sheetrock: one part of the site lay 6m above the other. The school is situated in such a way that it engulfs the rocks within it. Rocks were taken into the building, forming the walls of some classrooms and creating level differences and stepped seating on the floor of the library, which became an informal space, conducive to discussion, reading, sharing and group learning, unlike the strict formal setup of regular school libraries.
The surrounding context is colorful and kitschy, consisting of self-designed, self-built houses with walls of bright blue, pink and yellow. The school façade is intentionally non-descript, clad with locally-quarried slate to deliberately negate color in contrast to the neighboring houses. The common spaces are left raw and unfinished with exposed cement-plastered brick walls, primarily to reduce the need for maintenance in the future life of the building, considering that it is a charity school. And yet, the bright color palette of the context is mimicked in the staircase, gates, doors, windows, grilles and skylight.
Red, blue, yellow, green and orange create pops of color as accents in contrast with the gray of the concrete. The same colors reappear in subtle pastels in the classroom interiors, color-coding the classrooms and reminiscent of the children’s own homes. The bare walls of common spaces are slowly being filled by art by the students themselves, as a stamp of their ownership over their school.
A bright red central staircase forms the spine of the building, all the way from the ground to the top floor, where the roofs of the school become play courts connected to the existing playground. At the top, the old schoolhouse has been repainted to reflect the new color scheme and converted into a dedicated kindergarten block with access to smaller play areas under the existing trees.
While the building differentiates itself from the context in terms of color, it respects the scale of the adjoining courtyard houses by creating a smaller entrance at the lowest level, also in response to the scale of the students. Due to shared walls with surrounding courtyard houses, opportunities for ventilation were created in the form of light wells that run through the height of the structure, as an homage to the courtyard concept. A long geometric skylight covers the cut-outs and voids bring in light and air, and expand the space vertically. Narrow voids allow for winds from the higher altitude to be circulated into the center of the building from the top, similar to a wind tower. All spaces are cooled passively and naturally ventilated, which also reduces running costs. A series of bridges lead from the wider section of the school to the narrow far end with balconies for teachers overlooking the lower entrance and lane, where staff rooms are located. This effectively divides the school into a large zone that students can freely access and a smaller restricted zone for teachers and supervised student access.
Each of the lowest and highest levels of the school, with a height difference of 6m between them, has abutting streets. This allows for a bifurcation of entrances to reduce vertical circulation and divide traffic entering the school, as well as segregation of students by class, by providing entrances from the street directly to the lowest and uppermost levels.
The top level has smaller classrooms for higher classes, and is enclosed by a permeable hollow block wall with a basketball court to the north. The trussed geometric skylight above is 24m in length and designed using computational tools that allow for a large span for daylighting of the central core over all the levels. From its topmost level, the entire city is visible: the Golconda, the Qutb Shahi Tombs, the skyscrapers of Lanco Hills and the unchecked low-rise, high-density houses beneath.
The peculiar terrain allows each level of the building to touch the ground, and are referred to as Lower Ground, Middle Ground and Upper Ground. Thus, this school can be navigated in two ways: upon entering from the bottom and exiting at the top, as well as entering from the top and exiting at the bottom. In a major departure from conventional design, the building is more experiential from the inside-out: due to the shared walls of neighboring houses, the exterior is almost entirely hidden, and the interior opens itself up to the users.
What is unique about this project is that the architectural design was never finalized before construction. The site dictated the design process. The difficult terrain called for extensive land and geological surveys that still failed at capturing all the information about the site. Upon excavation, sheet rock and undulations were discovered in unexpected places, resulting in a design that had to evolve and adapt to the terrain. Many design revisions and decisions were done on site during construction, producing surprising results. Due to the tight budget, the school was built incrementally, as funds were raised. But due to the pressing need for space, the spaces began to be occupied and used while the building was still under construction. This allowed us to observe the use of different spaces, the impact on users and their response in real time, and we were able to adapt the design on the basis of this user experience data. The ensemble team working on the project was not highly-skilled and consultants devoted their time on a pro bono basis.
Thus, at times, design was delegated to workers providing physical prototypes, verbal guidelines, and sketching directly on the rock in lieu of detailed working drawings. A design-construction-use feedback loop was created to run the process, resulting in a robust built form that was not authored singularly by the architects, but collectively with the students, teachers, masons, carpenters, and fabricators: a participatory, multi-author design process.
The real life of a built space is its users. As we see students adapt spaces and use them in unintended ways, we understand the importance of leaving some parts of the design incomplete, to be filled in by the users. We also learn that architecture is not complete without user experience. The school has now transformed into something we could never have expected: it has become a magnet for the community, a gathering space for distribution of meals to families in need and a makeshift clinic and awareness center for the neighborhood during holidays.
The school was awarded a Silver rating by the Indian Green Building Council at the Green Building Congress 2018.
Drawings & Construction Images
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