Eight years ago, in 2016, Viren Joshi, president of Gujarat’s Service Association for the Blind, approached Ahmedabad-based architecture practice Sealab with a unique project. This was to visit Gandhinagar’s School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Children and help him improve its living conditions and education facilities for students.
Designed for children from remote villages and towns in Gujarat, the school was then functioning in a two-storey building where children lived on the ground floor and studied on the first floor. When the student numbers increased, the school was left overcrowded. Anand Sonecha, Principal Architect and founder, Sealab, says it was then “collectively decided to renovate the existing building and transform it entirely into the hostel block and a new academic building would be built which could accommodate 100 students. We were appointed as architects of the project in 2017 and the construction of the school was completed in 2021.”
