Education 20: Murong Settlement Patterns as a Framework for Parallel Learning and Family Care

Most institutions built for orphaned children solve the problem of shelter and then quietly create a new one: they separate children from the culture that would otherwise shape who they become. Education 20 refuses that trade. It does not offer a school with dormitories attached. It proposes a community environment where orphaned Murong children and local children learn side by side, and where academic study runs in parallel with craft, cultivation, storytelling, collective work and the ordinary rhythms of family life.

The project, by Sagorika Zannat of Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, was shortlisted in Education ’20. Its method is what gives the proposal weight. Zannat does not start from an abstract building type. She starts by studying how existing Murong settlements organise houses, pathways, open ground, shared activities and lines of sight, then reorganises the architectural masses without erasing those relationships. Sustainability here is treated as a cultural question as much as an environmental one: local materials, passive light and ventilation, terrain-responsive planning, familiar construction techniques and community participation all serve the larger aim of keeping everyday practices intact.

A Market Hall and a Gathering Roof Where Learning Meets Daily Exchange

The first two renders set the tone for the whole programme. One shows a market hall hung with woven baskets, with folded textiles laid on a side table and a patterned runner, and figures browsing in daylight. The other sits beneath a timber truss roof, with benches lining the edges and lanterns hanging overhead as people gather against a backdrop of green foliage. Neither space reads as a classroom, and that is precisely the point. The brief combines learning, care, domestic life, reading, production and economic interaction, and these spaces carry that ambition into built form.

The market is the more radical inclusion. By giving craft production a place to be seen and traded, the project lets children watch knowledge become livelihood, which is something a conventional curriculum rarely manages. The truss-roofed gathering space, open at its edges, works the other way: it is a soft threshold where children and the wider community can share time without a timetable. Together they demonstrate the designer's claim that education is a social ecology rather than a one-directional transfer of formal knowledge.

Bamboo Screens, Woven Walls and the Loom as a Learning Instrument

The physical models are where the project's material argument becomes most convincing. Woven bamboo walls filter low golden light across interiors furnished with bamboo screens, a figure holding a broom, and shelves of shoes beside folding panels. These are domestic scenes, and their ordinariness is deliberate. Sweeping, storing, opening and closing screens are acts the children would already recognise, and the architecture is built from the same material vocabulary they would expect at home. The porosity of the weave also does environmental work, admitting daylight and air in keeping with the project's commitment to passive ventilation and lighting.

The top-down view through the bamboo framing, looking onto a figure at a loom set on a red and green runner, is perhaps the most telling image in the set. Weaving is positioned at the centre of a room, not tucked into a workshop wing. The loom becomes an instrument of learning equal in standing to a desk, and the framing makes the activity visible from above and around. This is how traditional knowledge stays alive: not as a heritage display, but as something children can watch, join and eventually master.

Raised Decks and Curving Rows That Follow the Ridge

The site models move from the scale of the room to the scale of the settlement. A raised deck building with a thatched roof and twin staircases sits beside an open bamboo frame that casts long shadows across the base, showing how the structure lifts off the ground rather than flattening it. The top-down model in red-brown earth is clearer still: small timber volumes are strung in curving rows along a contoured ridge, with sparse dried shrubs marking the open ground between them. The plan is drawn by the land, not imposed on it.

This arrangement translates the designer's settlement study directly. Buildings stay visually connected to one another, and the spaces between them keep their role as communal territory. Pathways are not reduced to circulation; they function as active social spaces for encounter, observation and informal learning. The massing sequence described in the project, moving from green edges through indoor rooms, semi-open entries and uthan-like communal courtyards, gives each threshold a social job. The result is an architecture of relationships rather than a collection of isolated objects.

Houses on Stilts as the Unit of Family Care

The presentation board brings the residential piece into focus through an exploded axonometric and a section of raised houses on stilts, accompanied by material swatches and interior views. Reading the drawings together, the house emerges as the core unit of the family-oriented social structure the project proposes. Lifting the dwelling clears the ground below and keeps the building responsive to the slope, while the layered axonometric reveals how frame, floor, wall and roof assemble from familiar components that a community could understand, build and maintain.

This matters for children who might otherwise grow up in a ward or a dormitory block. A house of recognisable form and construction carries a sense of domestic normality that an institutional building cannot replicate. By placing these homes within the same pathway network as the market, the gathering roof and the weaving rooms, Zannat ensures that care and learning are never separated from community life.

Why This Project Matters

Education 20 makes a persuasive case that the most sustainable thing an educational building can preserve is a culture. Its environmental strategies, from local bamboo and thatch to passive light, ventilation and terrain-responsive siting, are sound in their own right, but they also serve a larger purpose: they keep construction knowledge, material practice and settlement logic within the community instead of replacing them with an imported institutional model. The careful comparison between existing and proposed settlement scenarios gives the design a credibility that many competition entries lack.

The project's lasting contribution is its idea of parallel learning. By letting orphaned and local children share pathways, workshops, markets and courtyards, it builds confidence through participation rather than through special treatment. For designers working on care institutions anywhere, the lesson is clear and transferable: begin by mapping the relationships a community already relies on, then build in a way that protects them. Architecture can offer children a place to live and learn without asking them to give up the cultural systems that shape identity, memory and belonging.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Sagorika Zannat

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Education 20 by Sagorika Zannat Education ’20 (uni.xyz).