Where Play Meets Architecture: Inside Mumbai’s Vertical 'Garden School'

As a born and bred Mumbaikar, schools to me are vertical buildings where astroturf is the closest you get to touching grass. As playgrounds shrink and skyscrapers cast shadows over childhood, the Garden School by JDAP offers a unique proposition: what if freedom and exploration could be built into a vertical structure?

For many of us in Mumbai, growing up often means negotiating with noise, congestion, and a scarcity of safe, open spaces. The school environment must serve as refuge, stage, and playground. But where land is unavailable and far too expensive, the luxury of sprawling campuses is impossible. JDAP’s solution was to design a kindergarten that embraces constraint, turning a tight urban plot into a multi-layered landscape for play and learning.

The school’s most striking feature is a spiralling ramp that winds around its classrooms. Rather than relegating corridors to transition, JDAP has recast them as the school’s main “street”. Running up or down the ramp becomes as much a part of learning as sitting inside.

For the architects, the ramp is a democratic gesture. It softens the vertical climb of the building, ensuring that children move at their own pace, with curiosity rather than compulsion.

Inside, the design dampens the chaos of the street while filtering in natural light through perforated metal screens. Small, carefully placed openings allow children to look out at Mumbai on their own terms. This calibrated relationship with the city reflects a larger pedagogical principle — children need to feel sheltered yet never severed from their environment. The building teaches them how to engage with the urban world without being overwhelmed by it.

Unlike conventional school designs that separate classrooms from play, the Garden School fuses the two. Wide steps double as amphitheatres for dance or drama, railings change colour floor by floor to help orientation, and the rooftop morphs into a multifunctional hall.

The Garden School demonstrates that in dense cities, designing for children requires more than squeezing classrooms into available land. It calls for reimagining what a school can be when horizontal spread is no longer possible. Here, verticality is an opportunity, a way of layering experiences, multiplying perspectives, and ensuring that the act of moving through the school is as valuable as the lessons taught inside it.

In many ways, the Garden School suggests that architecture, when attuned to the scale of a child, can carve out freedom in even the most constrained contexts. In the rising skylines of megacities, that is our most urgent lesson of all.

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