Chapter Five

SOS CHILDREN’S
VILLAGES

Anjalendran’s interest in the link between architecture and social well-being had already emerged when he was an undergraduate. In his final year at Moratuwa, when asked to carry out an investigation of ‘recycling’, he looked at people rather than building materials and focussed on the plight of orphan children. Later he studied the spatial implications of social structures with Bill Hillier on his ‘space syntax’ course at University College London.

Again Anjalendran took his lead from Geoffrey Bawa, who, although best known for his resort hotels, had designed an important series of social buildings for the Catholic Church. These included Boys’ Towns for the De La Salle Brothers at Ragama in Sri Lanka and Madurai in India and farm schools at Yahapath Endera and Mahahalpe in Sri Lanka. Bawa’s approach was based not on any abstract social theory, but on ‘empathy’. In designing the Boys’ Town at Madurai he first interrogated his client, Brother Gottwald, about the functional requirements of the brief, but then he tried to put himself in the place of a small boy who would live there and imagine how he would react to his surroundings. He set the dormitory blocks in groups of four around a landscaped court which served as a play area, and structured the whole community around a clear and legible hierarchy of space. Each block included, as well as the dormitory and bathroom, small spaces for study, individual storage units and a flat roof where boys could sleep during hot weather if they chose to (Robson 2002).

One project which had a profound influence on Anjalendran was the Yahapath Endera farm school of 1965. This was designed by Bawa in collaboration with Anura Ratnavibushana and was one of his first projects to be inspired by the vernacular traditions of Sri Lanka and to function interactively with the landscape. Together, Bawa and Ratnavibushana demonstrated that generous and beautiful buildings could be built using the simplest of locally available technologies at very low cost.

In 1982, when Anjalendran was working on the design of the offices for the J. Arthur Thompson Advertising Agency, he sub-contracted the garden design to a young landscape consultant called Cedric de Silva whom he had met through Dominic Sansoni. At the time De Silva was also working as the landscape designer and contractor for an orphanage or ‘children’s village’ for the charity SOS Kinderdorf at Pilyandala and it was he who recommended that Anjalendran be employed as the architect on a subsequent project in Nuwara Eliya. De Silva later joined SOS as a project manager, and eventually rose to become its director in Sri Lanka.

The first ‘Kinderdorf’ had been built in 1946 at Imst in the Austrian Tyrol by Dr Hermann Gmeiner to provide care and shelter for children orphaned by the World War. Gmeiner went on to found SOS Kinderdorf International which now runs ‘children’s villages’ in over a hundred countries throughout the world. In order to reduce the risk of institutionalisation, Gmeiner organised his villages as a cluster of self-contained ‘houses’, each with about ten children living with a surrogate mother, each with its own kitchen and living room as well as bedrooms and bathrooms. Children thus grew up with a ‘mother’ and a group of ‘brothers and sisters’. A village would consist, typically, of a dozen such houses, often arranged in groups of four, and might also include a school, a social centre or a vocational training centre to help integrate it within the local community.

As SOS took on an international dimension, Gmeiner insisted that the organisation in each country should be autonomous. From the beginning it was non-denominational and great care was taken to place children in a group where they could speak their native language and follow their native customs and religion.

SOS had acquired an old house in Nuwara Eliya called Brooklands and planned to build an orphanage in its grounds. As a first step they wanted to convert the house into a base which they could use during the later construction phases and Cedric de Silva recommended that they employ Anjalendran as the architect. Anjalendran completed the renovation of Brooklands between March and September of 1983 and as a result was then commissioned by the SOS Regional Director, Siddhartha Kaul, to design the new village itself. Soon after, Anjalendran was introduced to Gmeiner’s lieutenant Helmut Kutin, who was on a visit to Sri Lanka. During a discussion about a proposal to build a school at Piliyandala Anjalendran produced a rough sketch design of how it might be planned and convinced Kutin to give him the job.

Children’s drawings of the Hermann Gmeiner School

The entrance verandah in the Galle SOS Children’s Village

Before designing the two new projects Anjalendran carried out a critical appraisal of the Piliyandala Children’s Village which had been designed by an Indian firm of architects. He concluded that the buildings were too monumental, the layout too regimented and the construction too complicated and expensive. His design for the Pilyandala School was built in one year between October 1983 and October 1984 at a square foot cost of US$ 80 per square metre, approximately a quarter of the cost of the neighbouring children’s village. Meanwhile, the Children’s Village in Nuwara Eliya was completed in 1986.

Anjalendran went on to design a ‘Social Centre for Mother and Child’, a ‘Youth Village’ and a ‘Home for Retired Mothers’ at Piliyandela and added various additional facilities to the Nuwara Eliya Children’s Village. After 1988 he designed a children’s village on the outskirts of Galle and in 1993 he began work on an SOS complex at Anuradhapura. His involvement with SOS lasted a total of fourteen years and during that period he designed all of their projects in Sri Lanka. The value of Anjalendran’s contribution was acknowledged by Kutin when in 1989 he became only the second recipient of an SOS Silver Medal for his work. Subsequently several of the projects were featured in international journals such as Mimar.

HERMANN GMEINER SCHOOL, YOUTH VILLAGE, SOCIAL CENTRE & HOME FOR RETIRED MOTHERS

Pilyandala 1983–97

The school at Pilyandela was built after 1983 to provide educational facilities for the children of the SOS Village and to form a bridge with the local community. Of the 700 pupils now in the school only about one-fifth are SOS children. The initial design was for sixteen classrooms, but when the tender came in at fifty percent of the original estimate the number was increased to twenty-two.

The site lay to the north-west of the existing SOS Village and had an area of 1.2 hectares. Anjalendran set the entrance block back from the road behind a paved court and placed the classroom block at the rear of the site, leaving a substantial area free for playing fields. The classroom block was turned through 45° ‘because it seemed to work better and gave a better visual connection to the playing fields’. The classrooms were arranged in four clusters around small courtyards, the two central ones being set back to create a semi-enclosed play space facing the playing fields. Clusters were linked diagonally to give spatial continuity whilst at the same time maintaining a sense of separation. The entrance block was designed as a large open loggia which could function both as an assembly hall and as a grandstand to overlook the playing fields.

The diagonal geometry of the plan seems to have developed out of Anjalendran’s interest in paperfolding and this also influenced his designs for play equipment. He made a set of three-dimensional metal playframes based on traditional Sinhalese Vesak lanterns and added play sculptures which were based on Hein’s Soma Cubes and Golomb’s Pentominoes.

Entrance gates to the Youth Village

Entrance to the classroom block

School children

Verandah of staff residence

The external walls were of local black stone construction with openings picked out in white render. Roofs were made up of plain Calicut interlocking tiles laid on timber reepers supported on brightly coloured pre-cast concrete rafters which rested in turn on substantial in-situ beams. There was little spare money for works of art and the children were encouraged by a teacher called Noeline to paint their own large murals on key walls.

In September 1984, as the school was nearing completion, Anjalendran was called upon to design a small parenting centre to the south-west of the school entrance which was intended to serve mothers in the local community. This consisted of two square buildings, one a medical centre and one a nutrition centre, linked by an elegantly roofed walkway. Each of these was organised around a planted courtyard which was raised to enhance its visual impact and to provide a continuous seat around its perimeter. The roof was supported on brightly painted wooden columns. Old floor tiles were set in geometric patterns in the polished cement floors and the built-in seats, and the external paths were laid with concrete slabs in which the art teacher, one Sirisena, inscribed pictures of animals.

In 1987 the Government donated a 1.5-hectare block of land immediately to the north-east of the school, and SOS commissioned Anjalendran to design both a youth village for teenage orphan boys and an additional teaching block for senior pupils. By a happy accident the new site suggested that the youth village might mirror the school so that the two could each look out diagonally across an enlarged playing field. In this way the addition gave a sense of completeness to what had hitherto been a somewhat incomplete layout and transformed the playing field into a large piazza.

Miraculously, too, the borrowed form adapted beautifully to its new function: the outer blocks were each planned as dormitories clustered around a courtyard, while the central block became a sitting and dining pavilion organised around three smaller courtyards. Anjalendran’s friend Barbara Sansoni helped with the colour schemes, and the main social space came to be known as the Rainbow Room. Sirisena, the art teacher, now executed a series of striking abstract murals on various internal gable walls.

Courtyard in the Science Block

The Rainbow Room in the Youth Village

Play space

Decorated paving slabs

Three small houses were built for the village director and the principals of the school as part of this phase. These were simple structures built of locally-mined kabook and black rubble, and served as interesting prototypes for low-cost rural housing.

In 1993 Anjalendran undertook his last commission from SOS — the design of a cluster of buildings to the southeast of the school. These consisted of a small crèche which was placed opposite the twin pavilions of the parenting centre, and a home for retired mothers which was grafted on to the twin houses of the school principals.

The four houses of the mothers’ home are organised in two wings on either side of a generous garden court. The third side is taken up by the principals’ houses and the fourth by a small training centre for mothers. In typical Sri Lankan fashion the formality of the plan is diluted by changes of level which respond to the natural lay of the land. The concept of the home ensures that retired mothers can remain in close touch with their ‘families’ long after the children have gone out into the world, and that they connect with new generations of teachers.

The training centre consists of two wings, one containing seminar rooms, the other a lecture space and offices, separated by a small courtyard and entered from a deep verandah. As well as attending courses, trainee mothers can meet retired mothers and share their experiences.

The Mothers’ Home represents one of Anjalendran’s most accomplished and sophisticated exercises in ‘simple neo-vernacular’ architecture, and its completion in 1987 marked the end of his involvement with Piliyandala and his time with SOS. Over a period of fifteen years Piliyandala had grown from a simple children’s home to become the SOS headquarters for Sri Lanka. In subsequent years more buildings were added, including an administrative building designed by Anjalendran’s protégé Sumangala Jayatillaka. The whole complex grew opportunistically in stages and there was never a master plan, but Anjalendran managed to impose a legible discipline of pavilions and enclosed gardens and a language of forms and materials which have given it a strong sense of place.

Bird’s eye view

Site plan

Lightwell in the crèche with Ena de Silva’s toy animals

The covered link to the classroom block

Window in the Social Centre

Mural

Entrance to the Youth Village

Courtyard in the Youth Village

Courtyard in the Home for Retired Mothers

SOS CHILDREN’S VILLAGE

Galle 1987–1994

Entrance pavilion

Galle sits at the bottom left-hand corner of Sri Lanka and receives the full blast of the south-west monsoon. Away from its famous Dutch fort it is a sleepy town of decaying suburban villas. The children’s village is located in the north-western outskirts of the town beside the Wakwella Road. The site is ‘L’-shaped and has an area of 1.6 hectares. One third of it, the part adjacent to the road, is flat, while the remainder occupies the lower slopes of a wooded hill. The project got underway in 1987 and was completed in 1991 at a total cost of US$ 600,000, equivalent to US$ 180 per square metre. A youth village was later added on an adjacent site across the road.

Anjalendran’s strategy was to place the village on the sloping ground at the back of the site, to build the reception and administration in a courtyard building beside the road and to leave a large flat playing field as a buffer zone at the centre. The heel of the site is occupied by the school which overlooks the playing field and connects the various elements. Traditional ambalama or shelters are placed at strategic points along the main route and act as meeting places. The arrangement produces a strong sense of promenade with anticipatory visual connections. The visitor progresses from the entrance gates and the car park through the reception building and along an avenue of plumeria trees which crosses the playing field and then up a flight of steps to reach the forecourt of the school.

Staff quarters

The central frangipani avenue

The village itself is hidden in trees. A dozen houses for ancillary staff are interspersed with the buildings in a double stranded necklace around the curving hillside. The houses are placed with careful casualness amongst the rocky outcrops and boulders which lay strewn across the site in such a way as to create interesting spaces and narrow winding paths. Double and single storey volumes are juxtaposed across the paths to produce dramatic contrasts of scale. Each unit houses ten children and a mother, and is designed on split levels to exploit the slope of the site. Entrance is via a covered verandah into a double-height living room off which is the family kitchen. The bedrooms are arranged at the rear on two floors, half a level above and below the entrance level. In a departure from traditional Sri Lankan practice the kitchen is placed at the front of the house so that the mother can watch the children at play, and the house is provided with a single entrance from the front for reasons of security.

Anjalendran has used local materials and simple construction methods to make buildings which are of low cost and high quality. Lower walls are of locally quarried kalugal or black stone, while upper walls are of a peach-coloured soft stone called kudugal which was found on site. Roofs are of simple clay Calicut tiles supported on brightly painted concrete rafters and purlins. Colours are used to add interest and identity: windows are placed in brightly painted frames and combine glass with open trellis and timber shutters; doors are panelled and multi-coloured with carved timber ventilators; verandahs are supported by painted timber columns. Inside the houses small ceramic tiles are set in the cheap polished cement floors to inject a sense of quality while the robust furniture is brightly painted and decorated with laminated batik cloth. The spaces are perfectly scaled to accommodate small groups of people, and there are bay windows with generous window ledges where small children can curl up.

School courtyard with Buddha shrine

Entrance courtyard

Roof details

Bay window

Village street

Alley between the houses

Whilst it might be assumed that Anjalendran had set out to recreate a traditional Sinhalese village, the plan is more dense than anything which is encountered today in rural Sri Lanka and seems to hark back to earlier clustered villages in the Anuradhapura district which were built as a defence against outlaws and wild animals. But he demonstrates how controlled propinquity can produce a remarkable sense of identity and community without loss of privacy: a salutary lesson for planners in an increasingly land-hungry Sri Lanka.

Anjalendran strikes a fine balance between order and accident, unity and variety. The community is given a powerful structure but every individual part has a degree of autonomy. The spaces between the buildings are handled with great skill and imagination: the main paths take on the feel of a paved village street and the floors are detailed with care and sensitivity. Every pocket of ground is made to work and no opportunities are wasted; even the boulders on the site are incorporated into the landscape. And there are memories: of ancient forest monasteries and medieval monks’ houses, of Bawa’s Polontalawa estate bungalow, of the Attapattu Walaawe and the battered walls of the Galle Fort.

Site plan

Sections and plans of a typical house

SOS FARM PROJECT

Malpotha, Bandarawela 1990–93

The Malpotha Farm Project was the brainchild of Cedric de Silva. With Anjalendran’s help he had built a small holiday cottage for himself in the hills near Bandarawela and he saw an opportunity for SOS to buy a neighbouring piece of land on which to establish a small rural training project. The land sloped gently towards paddy fields and Anjalendran designed a collection of simple buildings along the contours while Cedric created a series of landscaped terraces and vegetable plots. The buildings were built largely by the youths themselves using materials from the immediate vicinity. In its final form the farm included hostels for the students and a variety of buildings for cows, pigs and chickens.

The garden terraces

Cow shed doors

Site section

The entrance pavilion

Site plan

CHILDREN’S VILLAGE, KINDERGARTEN AND YOUTH CENTRE

Anuradhapura 1993–96

Section and elevation of a typical house

The children’s village in Anuradhapura was the first of Anjalendran’s projects to be located in Sri Lanka’s dry zone. The site was located on the grid of broad avenues which make up the New Town area of Anuradhapura. Generally a flat rectangle, it was cut diagonally across its south-eastern corner by the bed of an occasional stream.

Anjalendran used the same components and design strategies that he had developed for the earlier projects and placed the Children’s Village on the main flat area of the site to the west of the stream bed. The principal access is from the northern boundary where a paved court leads to an entrance loggia which contained the administrative offices. Beyond this, a cluster of four standard houses lines a transition space which links to a main ‘village green’ formed by a larger group of ten houses. The main court terminates in the community house which contained accommodation for the nurses and ‘aunts’. A bridge connects across the stream to a social centre with kindergarten and a small training workshop. The striking collection of children’s toy furniture was made at Ena de Silva’s Aluvihare Workshop. A hostel for boys was located on a strip of land to the west of the main site across a small road.

The village green

A typical house interior

School courtyard

Workshop in the Youth Village

Site plan