When schools reopened in June 2015 two months after the earthquake, students attended class in tents or temporary classrooms. They used untreated bamboo, plywood panels, razor-sharp corrugated steel sheets that were dangerous and offered no protection against the elements.
One of the 8,000 schools destroyed five years ago was the Janasewa Primary School and its two classrooms in Makaldamar of Makwanpur district south of Kathmandu. After schools reopened, local Chepang children attended class in a makeshift shed.
The Sustainable Mountain Architecture (SMA) team in Kathmandu surveyed the Makwanpur site to see if a larger school with four classrooms, a staff room and kitchen could be built. The major challenge was that with the steep slope on three sides and the mountain on the other, there was not enough space for the children to run and play. The team decided to use the roof.
A new class structure, Monika Deupala
The school design is inspired by the Open Air School concept in Europe in the 1920s, which were airy, bright and less cramped. The most famous example of this is the school designed by Dutch architect Johannes Duiker in Amsterdam (1930) which is still running.
Schools and kindergartens all over the world are being designed with purposeful roofscapes. Be it the Fuji kindergarten (2007) by Tezuka Architects in Japan, where the gigantic oval shaped roof deck allows unfettered learning and play for children or Skanderborggade (2005) in Denmark by architect Dorte Mandrup, where she had to be creative with the given small plot.
In the Makwanpur school, SMA designed the four classrooms in the shape of a trapezium arranged like a bow tie. This shape allowed the functional need for more entry/exit space towards the courtyard and partly in the need for good acoustics inside the classroom.
The design is earthquake resistant, comfortable and takes the climate and seasons into account — different from all the hurriedly made schools in 2015 or the standard design which do notaddress context, orientation and weather.
The two interior curved corners use local river stones that contrast with the unique colour for each of the four classrooms. Bright hues of pink, green, blue and yellow promote playfulness and stimulate learning.
Playing steps of different heights can be used for seating during a group congregation or a theatre performance. Once at the level of the roof, children can actually run around via metal bridges that connect the rooftops of their classrooms.
To reduce heat gain during the warmest months, the two classroom blocks are placed on the northwest and the northeast of the site. The 350mm thick stone masonry walls work efficiently as natural thermal mass and keep the buildings warm in the winter and cooler in the summer. The large sal tree on the southwest of the site shields the sun in summer.
The design invites cross ventilation, the rounded corners allow free flow of the wind across the courtyard and help cross ventilation naturally. In the shaded open centre of the school, a newly planted jacaranda parasol will cover the children sitting around the stepped down courtyard.
Movement of the children and the air were two important starting points for the design. Due to the airflow, the school is comfortable during the hot months, and the playful roof circuit is used by the children every day.
Sapana Shakya is an architect with Sustainable Mountain Architecture, a Nepali non-profit founded by Anne Feenstra to promote innovative pro-people, pro-ecology, pro-local building techniques.
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