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Alluding to the impetus that children have towards landscape over a building we imagined the library building to be a formal extension of the ground plane. A place inside for study and a place above for play.
What is the project about?
The site chosen for this small addition of a children’s library within a school in rural Maharashtra was a sliver between existing buildings and the school boundary, a site that almost implied a linear building footprint to adjust the program for the chosen site. With the limited teaching resources available in the larger vicinity we needed the inspiring spatial experience to be a magnet to attract students and hopefully other residents from the nearby settlements after school hours.
On our first visit to the site, it was interesting to see Geodesic structures built by an engineer for a few of the school buildings, we were somewhat encouraged by this to pursue a project that followed from a construction intelligence. We hence parsed through several possible material configurations ranging from concrete shells to brick vaults for building this ‘architectural landscape’. At this point we were captivated by the material efficiencies of the Catalan tile vault from the 16th century, it’s used by Gustavino in the early 19th century and finally the incredible details from the work of Eladio Dieste from the mid-twentieth century. While working with the specific site condition we used Rhino Vault developed by the Block Research Group at the ETH to articulate a pure compression form for the project.
The library lies at the intersection of a student’s daily routine it became a pavilion accessed from multiple sides with students potentially engaging with books while traversing through the library or over it.
The library interior has varied spatial & seating systems, a floor stool system towards the edges for a more intimate study area and towards the centre, tables and stools for collaborative study. The self-structured window bays are striated profiles for increased stability with economical window section sizes.
Project Funded by
Client: Somaiya Vidyavihar
Stakeholders Involved
Architects:
Sameep Padora & Associates
Design team:
Vami Seth Koticha, Archita Banerjee, Manasi Punde, Aparna Dhareshwar
Structural Engineering:
Foundation Design: Sameer Sawant
Superstructure:
Rhino Vault, Vivek Garg
Contractor
Unique Concrete : Rajesh Murkar, Milind Naik
Site Supervision
Zubair Kachawa
What is the impact?
The construction technology for the project also makes a case to reexamine the age-old binaries of the global and local as being in opposition. The regional or the local within the South Asian paradigm typically manifest within strict formal constraints of the style in memory. This is often at the expense of material efficiencies.
Our effort to search for a material and construction efficiency in brick tile looked to leverage the networks of knowledge that our practices are situated in, allowing us to enrich the regional or local through the extended capacities of the global.
In using principles ranging from the Catalan Tile Vaulting system to the compression ring detail from the work of Eladio Dieste in Uruguay, to using a form-finding software plugin made in Switzerland the library is a resultant of not only lessons learnt from various geographic locations but also various lessons through time/history.
Gallery:
Images by Edmund Sumner and Sameep Padora and Associates | © all rights reserved
Technical Drawings:
Drawings by Sameep Padora & Associates | © all rights reserved
Links to read more:
About Sameep Padora & Associates:
As a practice, we at sP+a believe that India’s vast breadth of socio-cultural environments requires multifarious means of engaging with the country’s varying contexts. Type, Program, Design and Building processes are subservient to the immediacy of each project’s unique frame of reference.
Our practice questions the nostalgia involved with the static ‘museumification’ of craft and tradition as well as the nature of what today comprises the ‘regional’ in contexts amplified by their place in global and regional networks. This attitude enables the practice to look at traditional project types, projecting their formal/relational history within the paradigms of current socio-economic forces.
The studio structure actively engages with research, collaborations and collective models of practice not as isolated individual formats but as symbiotic streams feeding into each other. We advocate this hybrid model as an alternative to the traditional architectural practice, believing that this enables us to respond to the specificity of the local by evolving methodologies of extreme subjectivity.
