Project Location: Karbala, Iraq
Programme: elementary school & kindergarten
Year: 2023-2026
Status: on site
Gross Floor Area: 15,580 m2
Site Area: 14,933 m2
Design Team: Vladin Petrov, Karina Kusa
Structural Engineer: Asaad Jasim, AlEmaar Engineering Consultants
Background:
Decades of armed conflict, political instability, and chronic underinvestment have transformed Iraq from a country with one of the region’s strongest education systems during Saddam Hussein reign in the 1980s — when primary education was nearly universal — into one now facing significant levels of illiteracy and educational decline. Today, only approximately 38% of school infrastructure remains undamaged, while many functioning schools continue to operate without essential services such as reliable electricity and running water.
In the Karbala region in particular, educational facilities are severely strained. Many schools suffer from deteriorating infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, and a critical lack of adequate learning environments and supporting facilities.
The crisis is further exacerbated by limited public investment in education, with less than 6% of the national budget allocated to the sector, resulting in only gradual and insufficient progress toward improvement.
To address growing infrastructure demands in expanding urban areas, private property developers are required to contribute to public amenities as part of new residential developments. These contributions typically include the construction of mosques, parks, shopping centres, and schools.
Under this development model, private developers are permitted to operate the schools they construct for a period of 20 years, after which ownership is transferred to the state. While the scheme is intended to reduce pressure on public finances and accelerate the delivery of educational infrastructure, the outcomes have often been problematic. In many cases, developers have prioritised cost reduction over long-term quality, resulting in schools of poor construction standards and limited architectural value.
Site Location and Site Conditions:
The site is located on the outskirts of Karbala, approximately 17km from the historic city centre and its sacred religious sites. Positioned at the edge of the desert, the area presents an extremely harsh environment for human habitation, characterised by arid conditions, intense heat, and a lack of natural (green) landscape and infrastructure.
In addition, public transportation in Karbala is virtually non-existent. Combined with ongoing security concerns, this means that children are expected to travel to school either by private car or by school buses. While Karbala is generally perceived as significantly safer than Baghdad — where heavy armoured vehicles are still a common presence in the urban environment — security and safety considerations nevertheless became a fundamental aspect of the project.
The school was therefore designed with a safe and clearly organised drop-off/pick-up zone, along with a controlled single-point public entrance. This includes a secure reception and visitor management area, supported by passive supervision strategies and carefully zoned access control throughout the campus.
Design Intention and Client’s Goals:
Our school project was commissioned by a property developer currently completing approximately 1,500 single-family homes adjacent to the site. The project is being delivered within the framework of this public-private development model. Unlike many comparable projects, however, the client demonstrated a genuine commitment to creating a well-designed educational environment aligned with contemporary international standards and focused on student wellbeing. Nevertheless, despite these ambitions, a number of important sustainability objectives could not be fully realised due to budgetary limitations and the inherently short-term investment
horizon associated with projects of this kind.
Bullying in Iraqi elementary schools is a widespread concern, with studies suggesting that between 30% and 50% of students experience some form of peer victimisation. In response, the school’s architecture was carefully developed to support clear visual connections between students and teachers, enabling effective passive supervision throughout the learning environment. Thoughtful architectural design can play an important role in reducing stress, trauma, and sensory overstimulation, while also providing a greater sense of psychological comfort and safety for students.
The site has an irregular shape, which made it challenging to accommodate all the required sports facilities as specified in the client’s brief. Standard sports areas — such as playgrounds and courts — have fixed dimensions and proportions, which further constrained their efficient arrangement within the available plot. As a result, the majority of the sports facilities and outdoor learning spaces had to be relocated to the roof.
The heart of the school is the central atrium, featuring theatrically arranged stepped seating that rises to the first floor. This space functions as a flexible social and learning hub, accommodating lectures, performances, informal gatherings, and play during breaks. It also provides visual connections to the sports hall and a fluid spatial relationship with the adjacent canteen, reinforcing a sense of openness and continuity across key shared areas.
Karbala is a holy city with a strongly conservative social context, and the project brief therefore required gender-separated classrooms for the elementary school, organised in distinct clusters across different floors. At the same time, the building needed to remain flexible enough to accommodate alternative organisational models in the future, should educational policies change, without requiring major structural alterations or rebuilding.
Schools today increasingly function as community hubs, with key facilities such as the auditorium, sports hall, and outdoor football field designed for shared use beyond school hours. These spaces need to be accessible for a range of community events and gatherings, including religious, sporting, and cultural celebrations, as well as social functions such as weddings.
Climate and Environmental Strategy:
Summers in the region are exceptionally harsh, with temperatures reaching up to +60°C. Intense solar radiation and frequent dust storms create severe environmental conditions that place significant thermal stress on both building structures and their occupants. In this context, climate-responsive design is not merely desirable but essential, playing a critical role in educational quality, energy performance (and thus on operational costs), and the health and wellbeing of students and staff.
Traditional Islamic architecture offers a rich set of climate-responsive principles, many of which have been integrated into the design. These include, for example, deep shaded courtyards that trap cooler night air and gradually release it during the morning. Through carefully planned cross-ventilation, this cooled air is distributed into adjacent spaces, helping to naturally moderate indoor temperatures and improve overall thermal comfort within the building.
Western exposure of the classrooms has been minimised to reduce the impact of intense afternoon sun. South-facing classrooms are protected by a deep canopy that casts strong shade across the façade, while the youngest students in the kindergarten are accommodated in north-oriented spaces or rooms facing shaded courtyards, providing a more comfortable and controlled learning environment.
Also worth noting is the shaded main entrance along the street-facing eastern façade. This entrance is set back from the building line to reduce direct solar exposure and mitigate the thermal shock typically experienced when moving from an air-conditioned interior to the intensely hot outdoor environment.
