Wagholi School Block

An existing school needed to double its secondary capacity but could only fund the work in instalments as each intake arrived. The trust was explicit that they did not want a masterplan they could not afford to finish — they wanted a building that was complete and usable at the end of every phase, including the first.

The site is a flat 1.1 hectares behind the existing primary school, with the only vehicle access shared with the school's own drop-off. Building in three phases while 700 children were on site meant that the construction boundary had to be a straight line that could move twice, without ever cutting off a fire escape or crossing the play area.

The block is a single-loaded three-storey bar with the corridor on the south and classrooms facing north. Single-loaded costs circulation area — roughly 22 per cent against about 14 for a double-loaded plan — and buys three things the trust valued more: every classroom gets even north light, the corridor becomes a genuinely usable covered veranda rather than a dark internal spine, and the building can simply be extended along its own axis without touching what is already there.

That last property is what made the phasing work. Each phase is a self-contained length of the bar with its own stair and services at the far end, so at the end of phase one the school had a finished five-classroom building, not a fragment waiting for the rest. The construction hoarding was a straight line perpendicular to the bar, moved twice, and it never crossed a play area or an escape route.

It is a reinforced concrete frame with fly-ash block infill and a plain sand-cement render — an unremarkable and entirely appropriate construction for a building of this budget, where every rupee spent on the envelope is a rupee not spent on classrooms. The money we did argue for went into the veranda: a 2.4-metre overhang on the south, deep enough to keep the corridor usable through the monsoon, which is where the children actually spend their breaks.