There are memories of places that remain dormant for years.
For us, one such memory was the Indian stepwell, those extraordinary places where architecture, water, shade, stone and sky came together, and where the act of descending was also an act of discovery.
When the opportunity came to design a center for learning, that memory returned.
Sanskriti Vihara is an attempt to translate the spirit of the stepwell into a contemporary place for learning. Not as an imitation of its form, but as a reimagining of its most elemental idea’ the journey inward, towards knowledge and light.
The building turns its façade into a landscape. Also, the entire edifice is clad in Bricks which were specially made from different soils of India, as a fitting embodiment of this ancient land where religions like Hinduism Jainism and Buddhism originated.
Instead of enclosing the school behind walls, a continuous stepped promenade climbs through it, allowing students to walk along the very skin of the building. Classrooms, courtyards, terraces and places to pause unfold along this journey, making movement through the building part of the learning itself.
The architecture is less a building to be entered than a place to be discovered.
Light changes as one moves. Shadows gather and dissolve. Openings reveal glimpses of sky, landscape and one another. The solid and the void continually exchange places.
Ancient in its memory, contemporary in its making.
Perhaps this is what a place of learning ought to be’ an architecture that gently turns the mind from within, from shadow towards illumination.
Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya.
From darkness, lead me towards light.
An ancient Indian invocation, carrying within it the simplest aspiration of all learning: the ascent of the mind from darkness towards enlightenment.
And so, in its own quiet way, Sanskriti Vihara becomes a journey upwards’ a contemporary architecture rooted in an old Indian idea, where the path to knowledge is also a path towards light.
