Olive Groove Children Home Principal Architect: Salauddin Ahmed Team: Md. Masudul Islam, Md. Shamiul Huda Size: 8000 sft Olive Groove Children Home, a privately developed project, shelters 40 plus young boys and girls to alleviate their spirit by offering them a place called home. It sits in a rural context and surrounded by moist paddy fields and edgeless water bodies. With the seasonal flood and unexpected storm, the project responses to create symbiotic relationships with its surrounding. It deliberately detached its body from the base by putting the building on stilts. In doing so, it also gives a residual space under the first floor for the children to participate in their collective learning on a daily basis. Project also expresses its rootedness into the landscape by bringing layers of horizontal lines from the base to the rooftop. At times, these lines become a projected overhang, other times as opening to allow the hot tropical air to flow through the enclosed living spaces. Both the boys and the girls dorms are carefully separated with a set of stairs and the in-between spaces have been offered as gathering places for all the residences, both on the ground floor and also on the first floor. To mediate the separation of the two dorm spaces, a third element has been introduced besides the gathering spaces. On the ground floor, a teacher’s room, an outdoor open to sky community space and a library, guest room on the first floor. Building’s long snake like layout is in respond to the give site and in doing so, the whole building attempts to represents mediator between the land and water. A simple construction process has been incorporated in the making the building. On a quick glance, its speak of the traditional construction methodology but the layout of the spaces and its slip and slide between one space and another, represents a window toward future outlook of the given tradition. In the end, the architecture of the building is sublime effort from the designer’s to create and discover the room full of aspiring young souls.