Sanjay Puri Architects' Nokha Village Community Centre
Community Center in India Wins Building of the Year
The Nokha Village Community Centre in the Indian state of Rajasthan received the most votes in our poll for World Building of the Year 2024. Designed by Mumbai's Sanjay Puri Architects, the rural building near the village of Nokha consists of a library and community space serving people in Nokha and nearby villages. The small building makes a statement with its curving, ascending form that embraces a courtyard and integrates a roof garden.
After many years of hosting Buildings of the Week on the American-Architects platform, 2024 was the first year for its replacement: a Building of the Week on World-Architects open to the whole world, to all countries. For its inaugural year, the World Building of the Week featured 40 projects across five continents, from Mexico and the United States to Spain, Switzerland, China, New Zealand, and many other countries. The winner, the Nokha Village Community Centre, has a small footprint of just 9,000 square feet (836 m2), but its reach is large, as it serves 144 small villages near Nokha, the municipality about 175 miles (280 km) west of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan.
Hired by a former residential client who wanted to create a memorial to their late father, Sanjay Puri Architects designed the Nokha Village Community Centre as a building that integrates with its landscape to create additional usable space beyond its small enclosed footprint. These spaces include a sheltered courtyard and amphitheatre in the center of the building's swirling footprint, and a rooftop garden that ramps up from the plaza fronting the building. Furthermore, sun and climate impacted the building's form, with the courtyard oriented toward the north to provide shade, earth berms on three sides mitigating heat gain, and the grass roof also reducing heat gain.
The Nokha Village Community Centre is surrounded by desert, so appropriately it is clad in locally sourced sandstone. Most striking is at the library, where sandstone screens filter the sunlight entering the ovoid space. The museum, housed in a long curving space beneath the ramping roof, is illuminated by light scoops set into the earth berm. The project is completed by two simple outbuildings with cafeteria, kitchen, restrooms, and other ancillary spaces. The whole project gives the community a place to gather and engage with each other and their natural surroundings.
“This is absolutely incredible news. It is an honor for our building to be chosen by the community and those who voted for it. We are very grateful to our clients who supported our vision to create spaces for the villagers and children from 144 villages in Nokha, Rajasthan, where this building of only 9,000 square feet is visited and used by over 500 people daily, providing much needed spaces for studying and social activities. We share our win with the numerous workers and artisans of the village who came together to build this community centre as well as our team from our studio and the consultants who worked on this project.”
The Building of the Year poll on World-Architects was open for the month of January, asking visitors to select their favorite building from the 40 Buildings of the Week featured in 2024. The Nokha Village Community Centre tallied approximately 23% of the roughly 3,500 votes cast. The three runners-up are listed below, with links to their respective Buildings of the Week.
Congratulations to the winner and runners-up — and a big thanks to you, our readers, for voting!