The Hands of Faith: A Boarding School That Opens Two Wings Around Children Who Grew Up Working

A child who has spent years working on the street learns to read space as threat or opportunity, rarely as shelter. Any building meant to change that has to do more than house them. It has to teach, slowly, that a door can close for privacy and open again without loss, and that being seen is not the same as being exposed.

The Hands of Faith takes on that task as a boarding school and safe house for working children. It was designed by saba ahmadikia, narges ahmadshoar, Shima Lotfi and parham banimahd, with Hani Mansurnejad as mentor, and entered in The SafeHouse. The team frames the project as "supporting hands that try to instill a sense of security and love and support in children and create a bright horizon in front of them." In this scheme the metaphor is the plan itself, not decoration.

Two Wings Cupped Around a Garden

The floor plans read as two splayed wings meeting at a curved hub, like open palms held together. The courtyard sits inside them: a lawn crossed by pale paths, a few trees, round planters and a cluster of slender steel frames. Every room on the inner faces looks into this protected ground, so the garden becomes the shared center of the community rather than leftover space between blocks.

The gesture matters because of who it serves. The team describes children who have been overlooked by their surroundings and set out to mark their place of residence so that they "can be seen and accepted." The wings shelter them without walling them in. The courtyard stays open at its far end, a visible horizon that matches the language of the brief.

A Curved Glass Base That Splits Into Two Corridors

The building is entered from the southeast through a curved glazed lobby set beneath heavier concrete volumes. A single entrance divides the program cleanly. The right corridor holds offices, the dining hall, a game hall and service spaces. The left corridor holds shops where children's achievements are displayed and sold, along with a meeting room for parents and a buffet. Stairs and elevators in both wings lead up to the suites.

The shop for children's work is the sharpest programmatic idea in the scheme. For children whose labor has been exploited, selling what they make inside a protected institution changes what work means: it becomes a product of skill, presented with dignity, near the front door where parents and visitors arrive.

Louvers and Fins as a Living Facade

Stepped concrete blocks are punctuated by tall green and maroon fins and by windows with movable louvers that residents adjust for light, privacy and ventilation. The team pairs these with vertical terraces in the dormitory units that act as air corridors, and a central void that draws air through the lobby and service spaces. The result is a facade that shifts with occupation. Some louvers sit open and some closed, some panels are planted green, and the elevation records the habits of the people behind it instead of presenting a uniform institutional wall.

Terraces That Rehearse Belonging Step by Step

The most thoughtful move is a gradient of thresholds. Accommodation is organized as suites of two to seven children, each guided by counselors. Between these units, common terraces open onto public terraces, which step down to the yard. The team describes this hierarchy as therapeutic: a teenager learns to recognize the line between private and social space and, with advisors, crosses it gradually into the larger community. Grassy terraced steps and planted beds at the base of the curved facade make that descent literal, a slope a child can sit on before choosing to join in.

This is where the hands metaphor earns its weight. Shelter is presented as a sequence, not a single enclosure, and each layer offers a little more exposure than the last. The renders keep the program legible. A sharper study of the inner terrace edges, where most of this rehearsal would take place, would show how intimate those intermediate spaces really are.

Why This Project Matters

Shelters for vulnerable children often default to either dormitory efficiency or a defensive retreat from the city. The Hands of Faith argues for something in between: a building that protects through its plan, shows through its facade, and reintegrates through a staged ladder of thresholds. Its strongest idea is that recovery has a spatial shape, moving from suite to terrace to courtyard to street.

The project also widens what a safe house can hold. Skill classes, sports, therapeutic rooms and a storefront for children's own work place this institution closer to a small town than a refuge. For designers working on care architecture, the lesson is clear: privacy and visibility are not opposites to trade off. They are steps to be arranged in sequence, so that a child can climb them at their own pace.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Hani Mansurnejad, saba ahmadikia, narges ahmadshoar, Shima Lotfi, parham banimahd

Competition and award

Entry in The SafeHouse

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