A-Maze!: An Anganwadi Courtyard Where Play Panels Draw the Routes and the Lesson Plan

Most childcare buildings treat the playground as leftover ground between rooms. A-Maze! reverses that order. Its organising idea is a field of freestanding panels, set at angles across a lawn, that children read, push, solve and run around. The walls work as obstacles, puzzles and boundaries at once, and the route a child takes through them becomes the lesson.

A-Maze! is an Anganwadi in India designed by Antra Lodha. The project was Shortlisted at Grassroots. Lodha frames it as a three-fold design solution that joins Spatial Design, Game Design and Educational Design, and describes the Anganwadi as a Safe Space where children are recognised as beings and not becomings.

Three Disciplines Stacked on a Single Courtyard

The opening collage makes the method explicit. A toilet block plan, the playground site plan and a clinic layout overlap, divided by bands labelled spatial, interaction, game and education design. The point is that these are not separate drawings for separate consultants; the same ground has to carry all of them. The clinic, with its waiting area, distribution window and medical storage, sits beside a free play area for large gatherings, so the courtyard serves mothers and visitors as well as children.

The model views show how plain the built shell is meant to be. Two brick blocks hold the indoor rooms, a curved shade roof spans the space between them, and the inventive work happens on the open ground: mulch beds, panels, benches and climbing pieces scattered under and around that canopy. Inside, a classroom of coloured low tables keeps the same loose, rearrangeable attitude.

Freestanding Panels Turn the Lawn Into a Maze

At eye level, the panels are the project. A rendered view shows a boy beside a translucent board studded with red knobs, while behind him a row of puzzle boards stands on posts across the grass, one carrying a word grid, another a bead track. Each panel is a small task, and their spacing creates gaps a child must choose between. Walls that in a conventional plan would close a room here open a decision.

The site plan reveals the underlying geometry. Kidney-shaped mulch beds cluster in loose groups, with panel lines threaded between them, while two tunnel structures, monkey bars, hurdles and a balance beam float on the open lawn. Nothing is aligned to a grid. The arrangement deliberately avoids a single obvious path, which is precisely what a maze should do.

Circulation Drawn as a Game Board

Lodha draws the movement diagrams the way a game designer drafts a level. Dashed blue and pink routes thread past labelled tunnels, slides, balance beams, hurdles, monkey bars and wash areas, each loop doubling back around a cranked panel before releasing the child toward the next challenge. A second drawing numbers the stops along two looping routes with separate entries and exits, so the sequence of play becomes legible and repeatable.

The hand-coloured four team plan pushes this furthest. Four paths, each with its own entry, numbered stops and exit arrows, run around the same angled walls, ladders and cabin volumes without needing to collide. One set of objects supports many simultaneous games, and the wash areas sit on the routes rather than off to the side, so hygiene is folded into the circuit.

One Kit, Reshuffled for Different Grounds

The description calls the concept versatile in layout and gameplay, and the alternate plans prove the claim. One version sets the panels inside a circular paved plaza, with green lawn mounds and figures in blue circles marking each child's zone, and a path diagram overlaid in the corner. The same vocabulary of panels and tunnels adapts to a new boundary instead of demanding a fixed site.

That adaptability is also where the scheme is most exposed. Zach Poole, Senior Associate at MBB Architects, who judged the competition, valued the play strategy but pressed on its reach beyond the courtyard:

It is an interesting idea to focus in on modular interactive walls for play and learning and how they can support the requested program. But I think this way of thinking needs to be translated into how the site is laid out and how buildings are formed and interact with each other and the site.Zach Poole, Senior Associate, MBB Architects, United States

Poole's critique lands precisely. The panels and routes are richly worked out, while the brick blocks remain conventional containers at the edges. The logic of angled walls, choice and sequence could have shaped how the clinic, classroom and toilet block meet the ground and each other.

Why This Project Matters

A-Maze! treats an Anganwadi not as a building with a play area attached but as a learning system in which the ground plane does the teaching. Its strongest move is modest and transferable: a kit of panels and play equipment, plus a set of drawn routes, that can be reconfigured for different sites and different games. That is a useful model for early childhood spaces where budgets are tight and the open courtyard is the largest room available.

The project also shows where the idea must go next. If children are beings and not becomings, the whole compound, not just the lawn, should respond to how they move and choose. Carrying the maze logic into the massing and the edges of the buildings would turn a compelling play landscape into a fully coherent piece of architecture.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: ANTRA LODHA

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Grassroots

Jury

Zach Poole, Senior Associate, MBB Architects, United States

Location

India

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