A School That Curves Around Trees: Inside Vadodara's New Horizon Building
A new school building in Vadodara, India, bends like a boomerang to avoid cutting down mature trees on its site — and hands its students a sandpit at the centre of everything.
New Horizon is a 1,442-square-metre addition to the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee School, a primary and secondary school in Vadodara, in the western state of Gujarat. The building was commissioned by a local chapter of Round Table India, a non-profit organisation, and designed by Habitat Collective (also known as Habitat Collaborative), an architecture, interior design and project management practice based in Vadodara and Jersey City in the United States. Bhavik Thakkar is the principal architect (Dezeen, 10 August 2026).
The building's boomerang-shaped plan curves to accommodate mature trees already growing on the site. Its two wings — described by the practice as a continuous loop around an open courtyard — contain classrooms, a library and a science room, providing additional space for middle and secondary pupils (Dezeen, 10 August 2026; Habitat Collaborative, Instagram, 11 February 2026).
At the heart of the building sits a triple-height atrium, topped by a domed skylight. Daylight pours down to a sandpit on the ground floor. Yellow-painted metal balustrades line the atrium's edges, giving the space its warm, vivid character. The atrium also works as a thermal regulator: hot air rises and escapes through the skylight by the stack effect — the natural upward movement of warmer air through a tall opening (Dezeen, 10 August 2026).
The exterior is finished in pale yellow render. That colour was not chosen by the architects alone: it came out of participatory workshops with the school's own students. Inside, patterned flooring made from kota stone — a fine-grained limestone quarried in the Kota region of Rajasthan — along with granite and sandstone, includes a radial triangular pattern surrounding the atrium's lightwell (Dezeen, 10 August 2026).
The Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee School now has seven classrooms and an activity room in the new building, according to a report from February 2026 (Times of India, 21 February 2026). Habitat Collaborative has described the project as an attempt to change the perception of what government schools can be (Habitat Collaborative, Instagram).
The practice, which describes itself as environmentally conscious and contextually rooted, lists New Horizon under its institutional projects on its official website. It offers turnkey solutions — projects delivered from concept to completion — across residential, commercial and institutional environments (habitatcollaborative.com; habitatcollaborative.com, 3 October 2018).
What makes the building stand out is how many of its decisions were shaped by the people who use it. The exterior colour came from student workshops. The plan came from the trees already standing on the site. The central sandpit puts play, not a corridor, at the building's core. For a government school addition — a category that rarely attracts architectural attention — New Horizon gives its pupils a building that took their presence seriously from the first sketch.
