GD Goenka Signature School, Gurugram
Project Facts
- Project client – Sona Education Society
- Site Area – 20 acres
- Location – Sona Road, Gurugram, India
- Built up area – 2,00,000 Sq.ft.
- Year of completion – Phase 1 completed in 2015
The Design
Children’s mind is like a ‘tree’. it has the power to gather food from the surroundings.
-Rabindranath Tagore
Children gather knowledge from their surroundings, not just the textbooks, they gather inferences from nature, not just teachers and classrooms. Children gather knowledge from their whole body, mind and senses not just by listening. – As explained by Rabindranath Tagore while discussing his concept for Shantiniketan.
The World School is like a woven fabric of built and open. By the virtue of its design, the school blurs the threshold between inside the building and outside. All the activity rooms in the campus are designed to spill out in the open and hence broaden the platte to learn from and teach from.
The river of knowledge is also a symbol of this dynamic and ever changing world that has all the activities around it, visually and physically connected, seamlessly flowing into each other. Therefore, enabling a strong exchange of thoughts and ideas across various disciplines.
Planning of the blocks is such that there is perforation between all the spaces. The spaces have been designed in such a way that each block is independent yet interdependent on each other. A series of built masses on site are connected to each other via pathways, corridors, ramps etc. This creates a sense of privacy as well as an environment wherein there is maximum interaction among children.
Ghats and outdoor classrooms have been created to encourage outdoor interaction among students. Children can contribute to the knowledge flowing over the entire stretch of area and also acquire the same from other sources in nature like what they see themselves. This would result in less dependency on man-made elements and more on the basic elements of nature like sun, wind, water and sand. The flora that develops around the water body is dependent on the seasonal changes.
