Crafting A Landscape For Learning

Breaking away from conventional school-building design typology, The Axis Pramiti School in Bengaluru by The Purple Ink Studio blurs the stereotypical distinction between the classroom and the outdoor activity area, thus emphasizing on an all-round education within a nature-infused setting that encourages interactive learning.

- Sharmila Chakravorty

 Design is everywhere. Right from the homes we live in, the cities, the towns or villages we inhabit, the structures that accommodate our work places, the retail outlets where we shop… the list can go on endlessly. Every aspect of our life is thus surrounded by a careful orchestration of designed spaces, one that surely holds the potential of shaping our personal aesthetic preferences in one way or another. Outside of their families, schools are the only places where young children learn to socially interact, learn about the world beyond their homes, and learn about people beyond their families. At the beginning of an academic year, the school complex is an unfamiliar space; children learn eventually to adapt and adjust to this space having spent most of their time there. This experience, in the long run, helps them adjust and adapt, learning to tread the potentially endless unfamiliar spaces they will encounter in future. This probably is why more and more emphasis is being paid to the design of schools these days; and rightly so.

One such recently completed school in Bengaluru is a testament of this bent of thinking. Designed by The Purple Ink Studio, the Axis Pramiti school building, for its students, is an intriguing space, full of possibilities and discovery. To the children, at first glance, the almost woven-looking brickwork can seem like a portal to a world beyond the mundane everyday.