THE
Volume 13. Issue 08. August 2019 Rs. 25/-
INSIDE TRACK CONNECTING THE DESIGN COMMUNITY Now view our web edition at www.theinsidetrack.in
Cover Story
T
he Library Building for the Sharda School in rural Maharashtra designed by Sameep Padora and Associates is special for many reasons. It demostrates a will to build in a way that is inspirational to the students who occupy it, as well as pushes the boundaries of architecture as is currently being practiced in India today. It is about stepping away from the “sameness” of building typologies. It is about exploring an ancient building technique and adapting it so that it’s relevant today. It is about being senstive to context and material. The Sharda school librar y building is located in Kopargaon on the outskirts of Shirdi in rural Maharashtra. The form of the building is almost like a landscape that invites school children to climb on it, or walk under it and explore its cavernous volume. This library explores how architecture can become a part of the memories you associate with your childhood. It aims to create an experience that imbeds itself into the imagination of the children that grow up in the school. It has been built with brick tile that is used to its utmost efficiency. The structure also explores a novel the ancient building methodology of the Catalan tile vaulting technique of
Sameep Padora of Sp+A recently shared a keynote at the Roca Think Turf event in Kochi
Thinking Global, Acting Local
A library in rural Maharashtra designed by Sameep Padora and Associates is an inspirational structure created by assimilating building sciences from different time periods and geographies.
The speciality of this vault is that it uses brick tile as a structural material, unlike in most other structures where it’s used as a cladding material
The Sharda school library building located in Kopargaon on the outskirts of Shirdi in rural Maharashtra appears almost like a landscape, that invites school children to climb on it, or walk under it and explore its cavernous volume
16 th century Spain and is inspired by the works of Spanish architect and builder Guastavino. Additionally, the design team of Sameep Padora and Associates were also influenced by the work of an engineer from Uruguay in the 1960s called Dieste, who worked with compression rings and was able to create fantastic cantilevers of brick vaults. Examining these ancient sciences, the architects combined their learning with a new-age form finding software called RhinoVault, developed by the by the Block Research Group at the ETH University in Zurich, to create an exceptional free flowing organic expression for the building. continued on page 2