Project 09 · School · Auroville · 2023
Aikya Learning Centre
A school for 120 children on a sloping, wooded acre in Auroville: four classrooms either side of a vaulted hall, everything under one long roof, built from the earth that was dug out for the foundations.
The trust asked for a school that could be built in two years, run without air conditioning and be added to later. The site slopes a metre and a half from north to south and had thirty-one trees, of which twenty-nine are still there.
The plan is one line, nineteen metres across: a classroom pair, the hall, a classroom pair. The hall is the school’s only large room and does everything a large room must, assembly, lunch, monsoon games, the annual play. Its ferrocement vault rises to 7.2 metres and vents at the crown, so the room draws air through the classrooms on either side and out through the top. On a May afternoon it is four to five degrees cooler than the yard.
The classrooms are 6 by 4.8 metres with a verandah along the south, deep enough to teach in. Walls are earth blocks pressed on site, left bare inside and out. The floors are Cuddapah stone, cool underfoot and indifferent to a hundred and twenty pairs of feet.
- Client
- Aikya Education Trust
- Site
- 4,450 sq m (1.1 acres)
- Built area
- 1,620 sq m
- Cost
- ₹4.2–4.6 crore, ₹2,650 per sq ft, built cost, excluding land and furniture
- Status
- Completed, 2023
Ground floor plan, 1:200. Section A–A is the sheet above.
The hall, June 2023.
From the north, through the retained trees.
Materials
- Walls
- Compressed stabilised earth blocks pressed on site from the excavated soil, 230 mm, unplastered
- Hall roof
- Ferrocement catenary vault, 40 mm, cast over a reusable timber former
- Classroom roofs
- Lean-to timber rafters with Mangalore clay tiles, 3.6 m eave, 900 mm overhang
- Floors
- Cuddapah black limestone, 600 x 600, honed
- Doors and windows
- Reclaimed teak from three demolished Chettinad houses, oiled
- Finishes
- Lime wash inside, nothing outside
Timeline
Four years and three months from the first site walk to the first assembly, of which nine months were lost to the pandemic and two to a dispute about a well.
- March 2019
- Brief and site survey
- August 2019
- Concept approved by the trust
- February 2020
- Auroville Town Development Council clearance
- November 2020
- Tender, delayed by the pandemic
- March 2021
- Ground broken
- June 2023
- Handed over for the academic year
Credits
- Partner in charge
- Aruna Venkatesan
- Project architect
- R. Nithya
- Team
- M. Dinesh, Priyanka Iyer, K. Saravanan
- Structural engineer
- Ganesan and Associates, Chennai
- Contractor
- Auroville Earth Institute building unit
- Landscape
- Kamala Ramaswamy
HUDCO Design Award, sustainable habitat, 2023.