THE BAREFOOT SCHOOL OF ARTS
14 Nov 2017
A community centre in Goa employs a construction system of locally sourced materials such as fired earthen tiles, recyclable metal, wood and bamboo to form a performance space of ‘hollow boxes’.
The proposal for the Barefoot School of Arts and Craft pavilion, a collaboration between artist Sudarshan Shetty and architect Nuru Karim, is a celebration of Goa as a cultural capital and a reflection of the state’s unique picturesque topography and location on the west coast flanking the Arabian Sea.
The project humbly explores design at the intersection of art and architecture, honouring a multidisciplinary approach and thereby reinterpreting the program and iconography within a contemporary context.
The outcome is a sculptural intervention, which serves as a flexible workshop space, performance space, and a cultural hub. Shetty and Karim‘s pavilion consists of indoor, outdoor and transitional public spaces, embedded into the landscape. the genesis of the pavilion design is based on ‘z axis’ vectors operating on the corner and midpoint vertices of a square grid, acting in equilibrium to create a pavilion design that celebrates both indoor and outdoor experiences.
The deployable pavilion is a hybrid construct encouraging ‘out-of-the-box’ learning environments. The common denominator of the pavilion is a cube which also references traditional architectural forms of the region by using sustainable material technologies and building the pavilion ‘brick-by-brick’ or rather ‘box-by-box’.
This construction philosophy allows for a very simple understanding of a modular system that could be easily decoded and put into practice. Cubes are proliferated across the dynamic surface typology to create an unconstrained volume within the pavilion allowing maximum flexibility for teaching, workshops, exhibition and event spaces.
The pavilion has an indoor space with a sunken amphitheatre for both teaching and workshop activities. The periphery, including the skin, could be used for exhibition, retail events and display of products. The stepped amphitheatre is also reflected in a dynamic open-to-sky environment that could be used during fair weather.
The indoor/outdoor experience enables the creation of a 24 x 7 cultural space that fosters the ideology of the Serendipity Arts Festival through a multi-disciplinary cultural experience. The structure is a light-footed concept with construction possible onsite and offshore. The unitised system allows for ease of production, packaging, storage, transportation and installation. The boxes consist of cells that protect the users from rain and also celebrate the outdoors during fair weather.
The construction system deploys locally sourced materials such as fired earthen tiles, recyclable metal/wood and bamboo, while the skin consists of reusable hollow boxes - 2304 in number. These boxes act as an insulation device, thereby withstanding harsh environmental conditions. This enables minimal reliance on mechanical modes of cooling and ventilation.