A Calling for Campus
My elder brother shifted to a renowned boarding school in Panchgani when he was thirteen and I was eight, precisely in Grade 3. Anecdotes of mischief, living with friends, chasing the warden and studying in a school with a valley view amphitheatre — were just enough reasons for being jealous of him to get the opportunity to make the shift. When I was in Grade 6, eleven years old, I urged my parents to enroll me into the same school placed in the valley meadows, but I wasn’t mischievous enough for them to part ways with their little princess.
To what luck affords, I studied in the same local school as my dad. The building, which in early 1970s was a three-storey structure, changed into a seven-storey pristine hotel-like tower by the turn of the century. The school had remarkably progressed as a teaching institution, but its infrastructure could only do so much. Our school ground was a kilometer away, and our assembly hall on the top floor was a makeshift banquet which was leased during non functioning hours. While my cousins across different cities were learning horse riding and swimming in their schools, we made our way through indoor and outdoor sports practiced in the same banquet hall. To people’s surprise, most of the schools in my city worked in two shifts to accommodate students in the limited area available. It was common for schools to not be ‘places’ but simply ‘buildings’. Space constraint, a problem that shapes the lives of nearly 21 million occupants, is to date a pressing issue in the city of Mumbai.
For high school, I went to one of the most prestigious schools in the city — the seat for national toppers, hosts for renowned MUNs and an institution of highly learned and experienced teachers. While I flourished academically, what was missing was an environment that only designed space could offer — an inherent calling for campus.
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When the time came to choose a university for my undergraduate studies, I was looking for one thing above others, a campus of its own. Even the relatively intimate campus of CEPT University felt like open sky to my past of being a caged bird. Across the five years, the place has influenced me as much as the people, if not more. I owe it to my architectural training and personal inquiries that I hold some capacity to comprehend how much educational spaces affect learning and personal growth. Ahmedabad, a design hub, houses some of the most beautiful educational campuses of the nation, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced one of them. Even after having literally lived day and night on this campus for the last few years, one thing that I still yearn for is the celebrated ‘hostel life’. Our’s being a non residential campus only allowed me to get a taste of community living, when I shifted with friends in a shared flat in the later years of college. The idea of shared spaces and common facilities instills in students a sense of community which further adds value to the environment of a school.
My inquiry into educational institutions ultimately directed me to study the relationship between the idea of a university and its manifestation in space in my undergraduate architectural thesis. Through the case of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a pioneering example, I analysed how the idea of ‘free inquiry and critical thinking’ was promoted through the design of the campus. The sense of belonging to a community and experiencing the campus culture influences students in their formative years, leaving deep imprints on their personality. Thus, making the act of designing educational spaces a crucial one.
“A university in its true spirit is aimed at learning and not teaching, at living and not simply housing and most importantly at creating a sense of ‘place’ which is far beyond the functional rationality of a ‘space’.”
A yearning in an innate mind that once sparked from a desire to study in a better space, this day, hopes that upcoming campuses shape the way for better learning environments for future generations. Today, a friend of mine shared a video of Palki Sharma emphasizing how the inauguration of Nalanda University is no less than a milestone for the nation. In times where we are pendulating between textbooks teaching canonical histories and scams ruling entrance exams, I view the coming up of a designed campus as a moment of hope — one that definitely served as an adequate trigger for me to pen down my thoughts and connect the various dots across my journey so far.
