The Right School?

Designing a school cannot be easy. Compared to a family home, or a restaurant, that is. Take a day trip through this school and figure out how it compares with the schools of yore, or better still, to the one you attended as a student!

- Arthy Muthanna Singh

When parents go scouting for a school to put their precious child into, what would they looking for today? Word of mouth, counts for a lot. Reputation does too. Then, it should be contemporary, right? State-of-the-art, right?Child-friendly… cheerful…world class…extra safe…

So GD Goenka School at Sarita Vihar in Delhi had just the right architect on their new project – award-winning architect Goonmeet Singh Chauhan of DFI (Design Forum International) based in Delhi, ready to bring in a refreshing ‘newness’ to the table. He believes that architects must go beyond the stated brief and use their imagination to create habitats that ensure experiential joy, while also being a visual delight. Perfect vision for a primary school, right?

When schools all over the world are striving to ensure that their campuses are designed to facilitate the engagement of the young minds by creating interactive environments that are a blend of study, activity and play areas, the GD Goenka group’s philosophy fitted right into that slot. They kept the brief as simple and concise as possible. Basically they would be doing away with the traditional methods of teaching which involved blackboards. In this day and age, it is considered to be somewhat archaic. The school would need to reflect and facilitate the new aids that schools all over the world use. They wanted highly flexible classrooms that could morph into whatever the teacher needed it for, with multimedia tools such as projectors to keep the children engaged and receptive. Moreover, they wanted adequate storage space for the children to stack their bags and books.