In a striking landscape overlooked by a dramatic forest of electricity pylons, an example of structural brilliance offers the school's students a new experience of space. n a seemingly leftover space, a linear edge bounded by school buildings, looming electrical pylons and a cemented basketball court, a library building lies belly-flopped like a beached manta ray. In the rural Kopergaon, a small town in the western state of Maharashtra, this edifice is out of place and out of this world. For the children of the Sharda School, this intervention is like a vinyl record, with an A side and B side, both of which delight. On the outside, the brick carcass morphs into an architectural landscape, an adventure playground of curves and contours meant for clambering, crawling and just good old-fashioned lolling about. Inside, the belly of the creature soars, its vaulting dipping and rising, providing both the grotto-like intimacy of silent reading and the elation of coming together as in the nave of a cathedral for a shared experience. The shell extends over its interior spaces providing both shade and insulation from the harsh sun over the Deccan. Sameep Padora has always sought to bring material experience to his architecture. His practice (sP+a) ignores disciplinary boundaries, seamlessly swinging from research to building, from parametric installations to locally crafted formal innovation. His metropolitan concerns are usually the outcome of deeply researched explorations of the city’s fabric. In the recent past, his firm has focused on affordable housing in Mumbai, divining knowledge from lived experience and proposing alternatives to the current real-estate-driven housing scenario. In projects away from the city, normally in the smaller towns of Maharashtra and beyond, Padora has experimented with various forms of materiality and space, working with available resources and expertise, reinterpreting common typologies. In the ‘Jetavan’ Buddhist Learning Centre in Sakharwadi, built form has been put together organically as an idyllic grove that is a central Buddhist trope.