Institutional
Schools, Colleges
and Campuses.
Institutional buildings are won or lost on daylight, acoustic separation, and how several hundred people move through a plan in four minutes. Our lead architect spent his Los Angeles years on exactly that — a 55-classroom high school building and two hospital campuses, at CO Architects.
What We Take On.
Schools and school modernisation. Colleges and institutes. Hostels and student housing. Auditoria, assembly halls and sports buildings. Campus master planning and phased development. Hospitals, clinics and diagnostic centres.
Phasing is usually the hard part: an institution rarely closes while it is rebuilt, and that is a planning problem before it is an architectural one.
Where the
Evidence Is.
The clearest evidence sits on our healthcare and education page — three buildings designed by CO Architects, Los Angeles, on which Ar. Shashank Nashine was one of the architects: two Kaiser Permanente medical centres and the North Hollywood High School modernisation.
Closer to home, forty-five years of long-span assembly halls, phased construction on live sites and 100% BIM coordination across ten disciplines is what a campus project in Nagpur actually needs.
What an Institutional
Appointment Covers.
Campus master planning and phasing. Concept and schematic design. Structure, MEP, fire fighting, acoustics and landscape. Statutory submission and the approvals an educational or healthcare building needs. Working drawings, bills of quantities and tender documentation. Site supervision through a construction programme that usually has to run around a live institution.
Phasing is normally the hard part. A school rarely closes while it is rebuilt, which makes the sequence of works a planning problem before it is an architectural one: which block comes down first, where the displaced classrooms go, and how the site stays safe with several hundred children on it.
Daylight, Acoustics
and Four Minutes.
Institutional buildings are won or lost on three things: how much usable daylight reaches a desk, whether one classroom can hear the next, and how several hundred people move through a plan in the four minutes between periods. Long-span assembly halls, phased construction on live sites and 100% BIM coordination across ten disciplines is what that actually requires.
Ar. Shashank Nashine spent eight years in Los Angeles working on exactly this class of building at CO Architects — the North Hollywood High School modernisation and two Kaiser Permanente medical centres. Those buildings are CO Architects’ work and are credited as such on our healthcare and education page.
Approvals and
What They Require.
An educational or healthcare building carries approvals a house never sees: fire clearance for assembly occupancy, sanitation and kitchen requirements, barrier-free access, structural design for long-span halls and, on a campus, the phasing consent that lets the institution keep operating. Each has drawings attached, and each has a sequence.
That is a coordination problem more than a design one. Fire, structure, MEP, acoustics and landscape all sit in our studio and draw into a single model, which is why a clash is found on a screen rather than by a contractor on site with three hundred students the other side of a hoarding.
Bring us the land documents, the institution’s growth projection and the academic calendar. The calendar usually sets the construction programme, not the other way round.
How a Campus
Runs Here.
Schools and colleges are built in phases, around terms, usually while the existing buildings stay in use. The programme is written around the academic calendar before it is written around the trades, and that constraint shapes the drawings from the first week.
Structure, services, fire fighting and landscape are drawn alongside the architecture in one model — which on a campus matters most at the joins, where a new block meets an old one.
Tell Us About the Campus.
The site plan, what already stands on it, the student numbers you are planning for and how the phasing has to work around teaching. We will tell you what is possible.