Belgaon Dhaga School rethinks a rural primary school campus in Nashik, India, by extending an existing linear classroom block with a dispersed field of smaller volumes, courts, and shaded passages. The project shifts emphasis from the enclosed classroom to a broader learning environment in which circulation, outdoor rooms, and shared thresholds become active pedagogical spaces, while its compact material palette and climate-responsive planning root the intervention in local environmental conditions.
Belgaon Dhaga School Technical Information
- ArchitectsPK_iNCEPTiON
- LocationBelgaon Dhaga, Trimbakeshwar, Nashik, Maharashtra, India
- Gross Area1050 m2 | 11302 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2020 – 2025
- Photographs© Pranit Bora Studio
The project uses the extension not as an isolated building, but as a field of courts, corridors, and thresholds where formal teaching and informal discovery can coexist.
– Pooja Khairnar
From Linear School Block to Village-Like Learning Cluster
The project begins with a familiar rural institutional condition: an existing row of classrooms facing an open ground. Rather than repeating that logic, the new intervention sets a series of smaller blocks perpendicular to the retained structure, loosening the school from a single directional arrangement into a more porous campus. This move changes the reading of the school from a frontally addressed building into a field condition, where the spaces between volumes carry as much programmatic weight as the rooms themselves.
The resulting plan draws clear lessons from village morphology. Instead of a single academic object, the campus is organized as a micro-settlement composed of courts, verandas, stepped edges, and narrow transitions. In an aerial view, the fragments establish a grain closer to the surrounding settlement than to a conventional institutional complex. This is a significant disciplinary choice. It aligns the school with the village’s everyday spatial habits and produces a child-scaled environment in which movement is broken into manageable episodes rather than stretched along a single continuous corridor.
This dispersed arrangement also creates a practical form of long-term resilience. Because the new blocks face both the courtyards and the older school structure, they are not wholly dependent on the retained building to function. The extension, therefore, operates not only as an addition but as an alternative organizational armature for future change. If the original school block is later rebuilt or altered, the new campus can continue to function as a legible, connected ensemble.
Courtyards, Corridors, and the Architecture of Informal Learning
The strongest aspect of the project is its insistence that education does not begin and end at the classroom door. The campus is structured around a sequence of interstitial spaces: a paved courtyard anchored by an existing tree, a sand court for looser group activity, shaded verandas, brick plinths that double as seating, and walls that become teaching surfaces. These spaces are not decorative residual areas. They are the primary medium through which the school expands the possibilities of instruction, gathering, and observation.
Circulation is used as an educational device rather than a purely functional system. Covered corridors branch and reconnect, replacing a prescribed route with multiple paths across the site. That freedom of movement supports different forms of occupation throughout the day, from formal passage between classes to lingering, discussion, and play. The project softens the disciplinary linearity typical of many school plans and substitutes a looser form of order, one in which children can choose routes and encounter one another across visual and physical connections.
The civic edge of the campus extends this informality into the village’s social life. The stepped arrival court descends from the road, forming an open threshold that can accommodate waiting, gathering, and informal use. Beside it, the amphitheater and workshop establish a zone that can remain active beyond school hours. By giving these spaces direct or near-direct public access, the project frames the school as part of a broader communal infrastructure rather than a separated educational precinct.
Climate Responsive Form, Section, and Material Expression
The layout is carefully calibrated to orientation and solar exposure. The placement of the blocks allows them to cast shade into the courtyards for much of the day, improving the usability of outdoor spaces in a hot climate. The program is also registered in the section. Taller volumes mark the library, art room, and sports-related spaces, while more modest blocks define the ordinary rhythm of classrooms and support rooms. This variation in height is not a formal excess. It is tied to use, light, and the need for different interior atmospheres across the campus.
Environmental performance is reinforced by a layered envelope strategy. Deeply covered corridors reduce direct heat gain and create a thermal buffer before one enters enclosed rooms. Vertical openings alternate with built-in storage and are fitted with perforated upper panels and louvered lower sections to encourage air movement while maintaining protection from glare and rain. Sliding doors further dissolve the threshold between interior and exterior, allowing teaching to spill outward and enabling classrooms to operate as shaded open rooms when the climate permits.
The material palette is restrained and consistent: terracotta-toned rendered walls, brick paving and plinths, exposed concrete slabs, and slender columns. This continuity gives spatial coherence to a fragmented plan. It also supports thermal and tactile performance. Brick underfoot lends durability and a stable outdoor surface, while the rendered walls and deep shadow lines heighten the legibility of openings, recesses, and curved surfaces. The exposed slab edges and white columns introduce a measured structural clarity that contrasts with the heavier wall planes, allowing the architecture to remain direct without becoming blunt.
Spatial Character, Play, and Pedagogical Atmosphere
Several of the project’s most telling architectural gestures occur at the threshold. Curved walls, tall vertical cuts, triangular openings, and inverted arches transform passages into places of occupation and interpretation. These interventions are modest in scale but significant in effect. They encourage children to look through, climb onto, lean against, and gather around architectural elements that in a more conventional school would serve only as an enclosure. The project, therefore, treats geometry not as image-making but as a means of producing engagement among body, space, and routine movement.
The preserved tree in the main courtyard is central to this atmosphere. It anchors a brick-paved outdoor room that functions as a contemporary schoolyard version of the village chowk. Nearby, the library uses a taller volume and stepped floor to support multiple reading positions, from seated study at tables to more informal occupation closer to the ground. In classrooms, sliding blackboard doors and openings toward the courts allow instruction to extend across the veranda edge, so that furniture, wall surface, and section work together to recalibrate how and where teaching occurs.
What emerges is a campus in which pedagogy is distributed across the whole built environment. The distinction between formal and informal education is deliberately weakened. Learning takes place in classrooms, but also in transitions, in shaded courts, on stepped plinths, beside planted edges, and through daily encounters with light, airflow, material texture, and scale. The project suggests that a school can support independence not only through the curriculum but also through spatial structure itself, by providing children with legible, open-ended, and richly opportunity-rich environments for self-directed occupation.
About PK_iNCEPTiON
PK_iNCEPTiON is an architecture and design practice based in Nashik, Maharashtra, India, led by Ar. Pooja Khairnar. Founded in 2020, the studio approaches architecture through context-responsive design that emphasizes climate sensitivity, spatial flexibility, and the relationship between formal building programs and informal everyday use.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Sanjay Ratnaparkh
- Client: Mungi Engineers Pvt. Ltd
- Project Management Consultant: Prashant Sakhala
- Photographer: Pranit Bora Studio
- Video: Sagar Bondarde, SBFLIXVISUALS
