Auro integral learning and living center

Abstract

The Project undertaken is an actual proposed project of a Residential Integral education School in the suburbs of Surat based on the teachings of Aurobindo and the mother with its focus on the Integration of the living and the learning. The acid test of the effectivity of an integral school will be the extent to which integral principles can be lived by the child in the dynamic reality of life in the world. One of the central ideologies of integral education is the integration of life and learning. What one learns at the school must finally be validated in the experiences of real-life for the learning to have any real significance. The first steps of this integration of school and life are taken in the school itself, for life in the school must not be divorced from life in the world. Transforming the educational culture by example, rooting the fundamental educational values into the system, and exploring different pedagogical approaches to learning can help improve, the output of Indian schooling. The effort is to create a comfortable world for the child through the character of a “Nano-Society”. The school is not one facility but a composition of many, with various functions and needs stretching from private to public, just like a Town. With this starting point. In the developed design concept, ‘The school as a town’, Learning units are spread along the streets and the core of the town is the dining hall acting as a plaza which is a central meeting place in the town. One unit can be seen as neighbourhood in the city where Residential and collaborative functional buildings are organised around the anchor of academic unit with watering hole spaces where all the students in the unit can meet and interact. The square is formed by the surrounding volumes with workshops, teacher offices and cave and campfire spaces. Learning unit of each group acts as the anchor of their respective neighbourhoods. Living units are in direct connection to the centre but still protected from the main street acting as the academic spine. This adds to the privacy of the residences. Collaborative and supporting functional buildings are placed in the intermediate spaces in close proximity to both living and learning.