Sustainable Green School Program

Project Architect

Vinyas, Center for Architectural Research and Design, 2014 - 2015

Client: Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Government of Gujarat

http://www.vinyas.org/

All Image/ Drawing Copyrights belong to Vinyas, Center for Architectural Research and Design

Project Description:

Vinyas is a unique firm, which focuses on child-centric design of state funded public schools (that are largely ignored by the design community since in India only private schools hire architects). They conceived an interesting project called the Sustainable Green School Program. Within this program (which got piloted in 100 schools) we designed an audit form for children and teachers to measure 6 parameters on the school grounds –air, water, soil, waste, energy consumption and land use. The school communities eagerly got involved in conducting the audits with state assigned engineers assisting the community. The schools studied this data to critically assess the environmental status of their own surroundings and suggest improvements to the state engineer for better designing of their building, landscape etc. It also led to a sense of ownership and improvement of systems in the school community.

Tasks:

Develop a guidebook for students to support filling the audit form which was piloted in 100 selected schools in the state.

Extract pages from Understanding the Audit Form - Guide Book

The Audit form guide book designed by me was developed to help the students audit the 6 parameters of their environment, namely: AIR, WATER, SOIL, LAND USE, ENERGY and WASTE.

The below pages of the Audit Guide Book showed scenarios existing school conditions and how they could be improved through simple interventions designed by the school community with the help of the state assigned engineer.