TEACHER’S HOUSING, THE DOON SCHOOL
Group Housing | Dehradun, UK
AREA 45000 SQFT LOCATION DEHRADUN, UK PHOTOGRAPHY SURYAN & DANG
The Doon School is an 82 year old private boarding school situated in Dehradun (Uttarakhand) Located on a lush 70 acre campus, originally a botanical garden, the school is home to approximately 500 students (mostly boys) and about 50 teaching staff. Almost all the teachers live on the campus and, in and out of the classroom, are actively involved in the academic, pastoral and co-curricular guidance offered to each student.
Multiple academic, extracurricular, dormitory and residential structures, built in distinct vocabularies, ranging from the colonial to the modern and the postmodern, dot the campus. With a view to enhancing the family accommodations for faculty, a total of 18 residences of about 223 sqm each were designed on two separate sites.
The Teachers’ Housing project at the Doon School is an attempt to encourage a more extroverted, convivial residential lifestyle for the faculty while maintaining existing sightlines and conserving land and vegetation. It conforms to the existing material palette of the campus while accentuating elemental articulations. It attempts to reduce the scale of the development by staggering volumes and create spacious and well lit homes that are more connected to campus life.
The teachers often open their homes to their students and so the shift in their residential typology, from stand alone villas with private gardens, to walk-up apartments and shared greens, helps make them more accessible territorially.
