I studied in a school my father designed in the 1970s. My daughter Ananya Bansal is now interning in a research lab that we designed. Both buildings taught me the same lesson, four decades apart: the space nobody assigns a purpose to is usually the space that lasts.
At Campus School, Pantnagar, open, long corridors connected clusters of classrooms - nothing more than covered walkways, on paper. There was no thinking yet of controlling where students could and couldn't be. The plan stayed open, almost extravagant by today's efficiency logic. What I remember about that school, decades later, isn't the classrooms. It's what happened between them. The corridor became a stage nobody designed as one, used for morning assembly. Some years, exams were held there too - rows of desks with the landscape visible on both sides instead of four walls. Art competitions took over the corridor floor, students sprawled wherever there was room to sit.
None of this was in the brief. The corridor was simply generous enough to be claimed.
At NCBS, we designed the same principle on purpose: open corridors, a wide colonnade, a deck with no fixed program attached to it. Decades on, that deck is where the institute holds its annual poster symposium - a year of rigorous, peer-reviewed research presented in a space with no walls. On ordinary days it's the informal hub where people eat and meet between labs. Some years it hosts a concert. Serious science and a celebration, in the same square footage, because nobody ever told that space what it was only allowed to be.
A purpose-built room can only do one thing. Indeterminate space keeps getting reinvented by people - for assembly, for exams, for research, for celebration.
I don't know yet what my daughter will remember about the building years from now. But if the pattern holds, I doubt it will be the lab bench.
Worth asking before the next capital project shaves off circulation to add another "productive" room: forty years from now, what will your best-used space actually be - the one you designed for, or the one nobody did?
