Netaji Subhashchandra Bose Boys Military School

      Client: Lokseva Pratishthan
      Area: 30 acres
      Location: Phulgaon, Pune
      Year: 2008
      Cost: 7.50 Cr.

Design Brief :

A residential boy’s military school, with a lot of area for outdoor sports and other activities. Along with an academic block.



The site was couple of barren undulating hillocks with no trace of a single tree. To spare flatter portions of land for sports grounds, we located all the building structures on the sloping surfaces of the hillock. The central table land place becomes the huge congregation space, binding all buildings.

The entrance floor of all the buildings from this table land, thus is actually  the top floor and the buildings go down with -gr-1, -gr-2 floors.

The external facade of the buildings is simple  of earthy colour, making it look like a vertical extension of the hillock, with a vast green undulating central plateau, masking their volumes.

The gaps between two buildings gives a framed eye pleasing view of surrounding farmlands and distant hills. It was an unique experience of revising floor plans simultaneously during construction.


 A basic working drawing set prepared as per the requirements of the spaces and circulation for each building,  which actually got evolved and altered during the construction. Some spaces and corners came into existence due to excess unplanned excavations because of the soft rock and some got reshaped due to less excavations than planned because of the hard rock.

The administrative block sits at the topmost level of the hillock, giving it an entire panoramic view of the surrounding and the entire campus. 

The school building, being linear, planned with a singly  loaded corridor, follows the curvilinear shape of the contours that the hillock naturally had. All the lower ground classrooms are stepped sitting classrooms, directly using the slope of the terrain. The open space between the school and the admin block has a green patch with different stepped passageways. The open patches of the area are also being used as outdoor class rooms during the winter season.

The dormitories all have their rooms connected with a corridor around of an internal three storied courtyard. As one enters the dormitory at the top floor level and looks down in to the courtyard, it's like entering 'bav' stepped well, in Gujrath.

The structure housing the dining hall and the multipurpose indoor activities, is totally below the ground level as far as the entry point level is considered. The top of the building is almost as an extension of the top central flat plateau, used as a large outdoor congregation space for the morning assembly. This top also houses some residential quarters of the staff, the guest house and two tall overhead water storage tanks towers. The water has been brought from a river almost 2 kilometers away. It is then filtered and stored in one tank and the other tank is used for storing the recycled treated water from the stp, which is then used for gardening and washing with gravity.

The entire campus now is totally shaded with green trees and green cover, actually making this earlier barren land into an oasis in the surrounding area. The building structures are made to  merge in the hilly terrain with their earthy colours and no artificial fenestrations. 

The entire development thus looks totally tailor made for this site and the purpose.

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