ST. ANDREWS GIRLS HOSTEL

Home to approximately 130 students, with dorm rooms spread across four levels the hostel also includes ancillary spaces like a pantry, recreational areas as well as social spaces. The primary design challenge was to create a secure hub for the girls — a campus within a campus that did not restrict movement while establishing a connection with the outdoors. A typical hostel block would consist of a defined indoor, outdoor, and recreation area like a canteen or a mess. To break free from such conventional zoning, multi-layered functions, and spaces were created. The design seeks to reinterpret conventional standards of human comfort by introducing the idea of adaptive comfort — the principle that people experience differently and adapt, up to a certain extent, to a variety of indoor conditions, depending on their clothing, their activity, and general physical condition. The design of the building is kept simple while identifying essential elements like the staircases as hubs for social interaction. Transitional and circulation spaces such as bridges open into lounges and pause points to create room for socializing and group study. The external staircase along the facade manifests as the fundamental social nucleus that is home to all activities, from large-scale celebrations and events to quick informal conversations. It serves as a social hub for interaction and helps in creating an experience while traversing. It also gives an opportunity to look outside from the building and frame views of the sky and outdoors from different angles and perspectives. The landscape design enriches the space by bringing the greenery inside to serve not only aesthetic but also functional purposes. The shaded courtyard hosts a diverse variety of plant species that require lesser exposure to the sun. Contrary to the courtyards within the building envelope, the building perimeter has been blanketed with a transition space to create a mean outdoor climate. This third space between the outside environment(2nd space) and the primary building facade(1st space) regulates airflow and decreases direct and diffused radiations by 70% on the primary facade. The double-skin facade was created using a customized hollow concrete block of 8”x8”x8”(lxhxd). It was pre-fabricated to reduce the wastage on site and pigmented to resemble the color of red brick. It is a self-load-bearing block that requires no reinforcement in a 20-foot-high free-standing facade, saving on cost and labor. The blocks have been successful in addressing three concerns. Not only do they provide adequate thermal mass to absorb the heat, but with a depth of eight inches, the direct radiation has to penetrate through several layers within the block and gets reflected on different surfaces multiple times before entering the interiors reducing glare. In addition, since the block is penetrable, the air volume passing through this mass loses its heat through compression on the basis of Bernoulli’s principle. The blocks are also slightly rotated at a specific angle based on the insulation analysis with respect to solar heat gain.