The SchoolsCompared.com Top Schools Awards for
is awarded to:
KHDA: Very Good with Outstanding Features
To understand the architecture of The Arcadia School in Dubai, you have to begin from a surprising place: philanthropy. And it is a very good place to start a school because it means that you begin with heart, and no small amount of love. The Arcadia School is, in its foundations, not a school driven by accountancy and hedge funds, but, rather, one driven by family and wanting to give back to children and the UAE. It shares this ethical heart with very few schools in the UAE; and these schools which also include, for example, the Safa Schools, and the very first GEMS schools, will always be, for us, the true "Ivy League" schools of the Emirates. Built on love, delivered with love – children, families and teachers first.
It can happen at any part of our lives, but so often as we grow older. We realise like the brightest star in the darkest place what is really important in life – and it is certainly not material things, the latest fashion, or really anything to do with vanity. When you look around you understand, often painfully, that inequality and complacency are two of the most awful things in our world – and that Education is the most important tool we have to put the world right.
It is this that led the remarkable Mohan Valrani, Industrialist and Co-founder of the Al Shirawi Group. to begin the most important investment of his life in Education in Dubai. The passion to change the world here was immense. Mr Valrani called in the who's who of every single industry that he needed to help him build schools that would define the very best education available to our children. And he started setting out his vision with two requirements: that The Arcadia School, and those that would follow, would make no compromise with ensuring children received the very best education possible; and, as importantly, that Teachers, the absolute centre of the universe, would be recognised and cherished.
Architecturally, this would be no "just throw up a box" affair. Mr Valrani went to the very best Architects in Education in the region: Johnson. Chairman. Godwin, Austen, Johnson. (GAJ). "Throw me everything you have" he instructed. "I do not want compromises." The discussion is the stuff of legend – but the results, in the two Arcadia buildings which make up The Arcadia School, speak volumes. GAJ are responsible for many of the school buildings that have defined the landscape for Tier 1 architecture in Education as it has evolved over more than fifty years. Many will know them best for Dubai College, a building that stands today, as was intended, as a forceful statement on the power and wonder of Education and one designed, in part, to reflect the history of the great UK boarding schools who have been the educational homes of some of the most influential figures in history.
Mr Valrani's impetus, architecturally, was perhaps more spiritual. It was always, for him, about light; about vanquishing the darkness of history and filling our futures with hope. His buildings were to be a physical reference to the power of light over the forces of darkness. GAJ were instructed to design buildings that allowed light to fill them from every possible angle; no easy task for even great architects – and a very expensive one. This was to be an architectural exercise in substance over form, of lived experience over surface statement.
“I want my schools to be transparent, there should be light from all sides, and this is the ethos we designed the school on,” Mr Valrani told us.
If architecturally the foundations of the school have been built on a belief in Education as the most powerful single tool for positively transforming our world, the importance of light, and ensuring that teachers are respected and looked after as the most profession in the world, the structures of the school equally demonstrate some extraordinary firsts.
The technological investment continues today as ultraviolet technology continuously cleans the air molecules coming through the air conditioning systems in both its primary and secondary school campuses to ensure the safety of the Arcadia community.
As important as the technology innovation is, of course, it is invisible. The emotional investment in architecture is what you experience visiting the Arcadia School – and what brings the school its greatest contribution to what it holds dear – the happiness of its children and its teachers. There are too many features here to list – and any way, words cannot capture the impact as you visit these schools of the sheer beauty, warmth and attention to detail demonstrated in every single interior and exterior space. In the Preparatory" Building, play areas use desert themes with organic shapes and patterns flowing through from the exterior entry plaza and into the two main ground level courtyards; both courtyards contain play items orientated towards the British Curriculum with play spaces generally themed under science, construction, Mathematics and drama; the FS courtyard contains an interactive truly play to ignite the senses and intellect of younger children; and inspirational reading areas are everywhere, with linkages provided by floor and wall markings for numbers, measuring and counting. GAJ explained:
