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Dagna Kolodynska: Engaging Square

Engaging Square is a master’s thesis that aims to introduce a 12-20 year master plan for Shree Janahit Basic School in Ratomate, Nepal. The design is to engage the local community and create new collective spaces by division of one existing common square, but also to build new, earthquake-proof school structures, with improved ventilation, acoustics and lighting, using local materials and labour. Engaging square’s objective is to become not only a school courtyard, but also a place that encourages local community activities after school hours and on weekends and creates equal opportunity for variety of social clubs to excel at their crafts, arts and traditional performance skills. Common school square becomes an engaging square. This paper addresses the problem of the unsustainable, universal design for rebuilding schools in Nepal, that is advised by the government and tackles the school subject, as a center of social interaction of the village, to sustain local identity. The observations and reflections in this paper are based on personal experience during the trip in February 2019, including a week of a workshop in Ratomate, where we interviewed locals and got the opportunity to experience the daily routine.