The charity school had been functioning out of a makeshift warehouse for years and raised funds for a building. The site is located on a cliffside, in the unplanned, low-income settlement inside the Golconda Fort. The project was riddled with challenges: a tight budget, a highly contoured site, a dense urban context, and Heritage Zone regulations. The school was founded to uplift the local community and empower future generations. We wanted to design bright and fun spaces, to encourage learning and growth. We also aimed to preserve the openness of the playground by not building over it, which is a rare green lung space in the low-rise, high-density, unplanned neighborhood. 
Articulating the peculiar topography of the site and its surrounds posed a major challenge due to proximity to heritage structures and tight urban context, resulting in a design that had to evolve and adapt to the terrain. Due to the tight budget, the school was built incrementally, as funds were raised. But due to pressing need for space, the spaces were occupied during construction. This allowed us to observe the use of different spaces, the impact on users and their response in real time, and adapt the design on the basis of this user experience data. 
We see students adapt spaces and use them in unintended ways and understand the importance of leaving some parts of the design incomplete. The school has now transformed into a magnet for the community.

This project has a bigger impact than just a school building. The outer walls of the fort house an unplanned settlement of small courtyard houses with shared walls, within the Heritage Zone. In the neighborhood children do not have access to affordable education and drop out of school to help their parents earn a living. This school was established to provide affordable education to the children and their parents and elders, built on private funds and charitable donations. The first structure over old ruins was a mosque, with spaces for men and women. A large warehouse had partitions to create makeshift classrooms. Considerable work has been in convincing families and communities to send their children to school. 
Early on, the school was planned to cause minimal intervention and damage to the existing terrain, and was designed to be a low-maintenance building. Extension of the school is planned with library and a computer lab. As the current batch of students graduates to higher classes, new spaces are being created. The project was published in the 2021 RIBA Rethink Design Guide: Architecture for a Post-pandemic World.
The school has now transformed into a community hub, doubling as a training center for the teachers, an information and awareness center for the community and a makeshift clinic for vaccinations or blood drives on certain weekends and during holidays.
The potential of the school is immense in educating the children, their families and the entire community. 

Afia Rasheed is the Chairperson of Mohammadi Educational Trust, the charitable trust that runs Bright Horizon Academy. Trained as an engineer, she is now a philanthropist. It was her mother who founded Bright Horizon Academy.

Takbir Fatima is the Lead Architect and Director of DesignAware. She has an MArch from the Architectural Association and has been teaching and practicing for the last 13 years, with a special focus on socially-relevant projects. She was asked to serve as a board member and has worked on designing a curriculum and running the crowdfunding campaign, #MakeProgressPossible to raise funds for the school.

Abeer Fatima is Lead Interior Designer at DesignAware. She is closely involved with the school and her aim is to make spaces universally accessible.

From the beginning, a participatory approach was adopted, involving teachers, students, parents and community members, to inculcate a shared pride and ownership. The project keeps adapting to needs of the children and responding to context and culture.

The ensemble team working on the project was not highly-skilled and consultants devoted their time on a pro bono basis. At times, design was delegated to workers providing physical prototypes, verbal guidelines, and sketching directly on the rock in lieu of detailed working drawings. A design-construction-use feedback loop was created to run the process, resulting in a robust built form that was not authored singularly by the architects, but collectively with the students, teachers, masons, carpenters, and fabricators: a participatory, multi-author design process.

Bright Horizon Academy website
Hilltop School on DesignAware
Dezeen
Archdaily
Dezeen interview walkthrough
Buildofy interview
Morning assembly at Bright Horizon Academy
TV5 interview