Jadgal Elementary School
by DAAZ Office
Client Private
Award RIBA International Awards for Excellence 2024
Jadgal Elementary School is the imaginative and playful, charitable rebuilding of a local school outside a rural village in South-Eastern Iran.
A new circular walled site introduces large freestanding, naturally ventilated classrooms around a central outdoor playground, doubling as a popular alternative communal space to the village mosque in the evenings.
The playfully expressive perimeter wall defining the site, is cut with big circular openings, framing the landscape surrounding it, allowing children to play in it and inviting people in. It thickens in places to hold the school shop and storages areas or mark an entrance.
Made with insulated concrete formwork to meet local earthquake legislation, it has avoided columns entirely with its expressive curvilinear design. A traditional local earth clay flood protective finish blends with the hue of the landscape and means it can also be easily locally repaired.
The classroom buildings inside the wall are freestanding, defining the central play /meeting area between them and crucially allowing natural ventilation from front to back of each with smaller more private yards defined between and behind each classroom.
The project is holistically conceived in pursuit of sustainable environmental and social outcomes with very limited means. What has been achieved is a credit to the successful participation of the village from its inception.
The charity commissioning the architects, enabled research first with the village and then design; of the processes of fundraising, the partial volunteer self-build and creating sustainable social infrastructure around the realisation of the new school.
Needlework classes combined with a village Instagram site were employed to promote women’s economic and social contribution to the village, raising aspirations and perceptions locally, whilst simultaneously raising income and the villagers came together to build the septic tanks and other elements before works started.
The new social space the school brings is the physical infrastructure and meeting point for these new perceptions, actively used at all hours and by many of the young adults and villagers who had originally been a part of developing the brief.
Location: Sistan & Baloochestan Province, Iran
Date of completion: 01/03/2020
Cost: Confidential
Gross internal area: 1148 m²
Contractor: A. Noghrehkar
