A charity school that had been run by a zakah-funded, nonprofit educational trust for the last six years finally required a building. The site is located on a hill top, in the unplanned settlement within the walls of the Golconda fort in Hyderabad. The project was riddled with multiple challenges. Since the school is run solely based on individual donations, the budget was extremely tight. Material choices had to be economical as well as durable. The site is highly contoured and covered with sheet rock and buried under a blanket of garbage piled on over decades. Articulating the peculiar and difficult topography of the site and its surrounds posed a major challenge: due to proximity to heritage structures and dense urban context, most of which is residential, blasting the rock was not an option, and other methods were not affordable.
© Ujjal Sannala

Architects: Design Aware

Location: Mohalla Gunj, Khair Complex, Golconda Fort, Hyderabad, Telangana 500008, India

Lead Architects: Takbir Fatima.

Interior Designer: Abeer Fatima.

Architect + Urban Designer: Arshiya Syed

Junior Architects: Mohammed Saad Ahmed , Rachana Yerapotina

Interns: Sasank Ivs , Aishwarya Sonthalia, Spoorthy Myneni, Hari Teja

Structural Consultants: Zedcon consultants pvt ltd , Wali Quadri & Associates

Area: 13000.0 ft2

Project Year: 2017

Photographs: Ujjal Sannala, Abeer Fatima, Arshiya Syed...