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Aatam Hostel is a residential building with hostel rooms for students and housing for the family that owns the plot. It is a seven-floor structure with a large central courtyard. The building is a part of a series of hostel buildings on the edge of the street with a large playground behind them. 

A hostel houses a temporal mass. What we see in the current hostel type is that creating relationships among these non-permanent occupants is never thought of. This stems from the present education system which mainly focuses on giving sole importance to marks only through textbook knowledge, in turn producing a type of architecture which creates an environment that cages a person within the room to concentrate only on their work and nothing else. Such living conditions affect the mental and physical state of the inhabitants negatively. The city of Kota, where more than 200,000 students move each year to prepare for their entrance exams, needs a typological shift in the housing form for the students which is compassionate and communicative.

The main design concept of the Aatam Hostel was to provide dignified housing for the students by opening up the building from within itself and to the outside spaces, as opposed the current hostel typology that exists in the city, where necessities like proper air and light ventilation are often neglected, making the spaces feel oppressive and closed-off, also disregarding the need of social connections. The Aatam Hostel was built on the idea of shared, open spaces, which promotes an environment of care and sociality; thus reimagining the idea of an hostel. 

The porosity within the building is brought about by scooping out parts of it, giving it a stepped form, making space for shared terraces at multiple levels and creating a vertical relationship between the floors. These floors are also visually connected to each other by the courtyard in the centre. This courtyard becomes the most social area of the building, as it not only remains as a transitional space, but it also becomes a place where the students can hang out, study or play together, interact with the family that stays there, making it a place for leisure too. As opposed to this large communal space, the terraces, or the part where the passageways are extended outwards like balconies, they become these intimate corners which overlook the street and the playground outside. 

The outside spaces, that is, the street and the playground, become as much a part of the life of the building as the spaces inside. It becomes an interesting change from the buildings around it, which have no relationships with the street, acting like an impervious wall against it. It also creates an interesting experience of walking through the street, entering a small area and then coming across a huge open space, surprising the person meandering through the space.

Here, the idea is of the living happens outside, where the rooms, or the ‘ghar’, simply become the resting places. These types of houses are seen across rural India, and even some old structures in the cities, where the idea of home is not limited to the four walls of a building, but rather it encompasses the landscape and beings outside as well. This home is also not restricted to its permanent residents, but everyone who inhabits it.

The windows of the building facing south are crafted in two parts. One half of it is funnel shaped with perforated screens (jaalis) which lessens the intensity of the sunlight received. The windows here also utilises Venturi effect by allowing cool air to pass through, thus maintaining a pleasant temperature in the interior spaces. The other half of these windows project out like the jharokhas which were found in the old palaces in Rajasthan. On the other hand, the windows on the northern side of the building protrude out like vertical bay windows, coupled with the positioning of the beds and study tables, the space near the windows becomes these alcove-like corners from where you can look over the street and also up at the sky easily. 

The fourth floor of the building is made into a home for the family that owns the plot. The form of the building remains the same throughout, that is, a structure that wraps itself around a courtyard. Rooms on either side of the open space are connected by a small bridge on this floor. The balconies on the two corners are a part of the stepped terraces in the overall form of the building. The hostel rooms continue on the floor above. 

The Aatam Hostel poses a question to the current trajectory for architecture that is moving towards a more privatised idea of living, where the concept of social is almost disparaged. It also highlights the issues of the a system that pits people against each other, rather than developing an academic space that encourages co-learning and care. 

References:

Aatam Hostel by Sameep Padora Associations, Architecture.live: https://architecture.live/aatam-hostel-at-kota-by-sameep-padora-and-associates/