"The Aparnaa School is a site for the testing of ideas, and an environment which is able to hold within itself many meanings of use and of growth. A place where the age of time is measured on and with the manmade."

Formalized through a series of linked courtyards around which small learning communities are organized, the spatial character evokes a familiar archetype. However, this was neither the emphasis, or the genesis. Instead we have looked to the nature of activiities, and the meaning of use, to provide an endurance which is material, tangible and a practice of the everyday.

The act of programming is a practice of bringing a convivial complicity between activities officially programmed and ones that aren’t, such that they need the other’s presence. A complicity that engages us in the search for a greater economy of means with the goal to intensify and expand the impact of a limited set of operations, asking less to be more through the interweaving of functional activity and material conditions. This attitude allows us to be a nomad within the built environment, consciously engaged with, and using, different conditions of the built form. And this cycle of activity and re-membering, played out day after day, reinforces patterns of living that generate and sustain the culture of the place.

Architecturally, the school is much less of a study in spatial terms as it is of conditions between. That is, it is a study of thresholds and the processes that are at play in their shifts and negotiations. And in its materiality, the project is an attempt to bring formal aesthetics to the effect of sun, rain and all manners of weathering on its surfaces; an architecture less to avoid than to redefine the relentless heat and dust of central India.