Context of Rural Schools
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 looks into making education more accessible but not much attention is payed to the learning environments. 8 climatic types, 11.7 crore rural children, 75 years since freedom still a dark dingy morose school template being dogmatically replicated over 29 uniquely diverse Indian States. We realized that with small tweaks, the use of trusses and local building materials the experience, cost and accumulated environmental debt of each rural school could be greatly reduced.
Daylighting Needs
On average only 6% usable space gets naturally illuminated in rural schools of India. Daylighting is an essential need for learning environments, the current design template for rural schools allows for small inadequate windows that leads to dark-dingy classrooms.
Cost Effective Solutions
We optimized our designs to increase the wall-window ratio from an average 10% to 65% which lead to a 1000% increase in the amount of daylight coming into the structures. In order to ensure application, the cost of making aluminum windows with fluted polycarbonate was derived to be competitive to the cost of constructing a brick wall.
