Healing Through Design

Our health centre in Bengaluru has been named a regional winner for Asia Pacific in the 2025 Holcim Foundation Awards, one of twenty projects chosen worldwide.

The building is small. That is most of the point.

We stacked it vertically on a tight urban plot, and almost everything it is made of came from somewhere else. We set stone rescued from construction sites into planters that form a green façade, shading the rooms behind it and cooling them without mechanical help. Pinewood pulled out of the waste stream became our furniture and our partitions.

At street level we opened the ground floor into a flexible amphitheatre. It is a waiting room when the clinic is busy and a place to gather when it is not. A restaurant run by local women operates alongside the health services.

The jury described a project that stood out by “doing more with less”, and singled out the elements doing two jobs at once: planter boxes that are greenery, shade and railing in the same gesture.

Chloé Zimmermann, our co-founder, led the work with Avinash Ankalge of A Threshold, for Project Smile Trust.

Why this matters to us

Health infrastructure in rural and peri-urban India is usually treated as a cost to be kept down. We treated it as a chance to keep value in the place it serves: the materials, the labour, the restaurant, the room to gather.

It is the same argument we make about a village. A building is rarely dealing with just one problem, and we should rarely design it to solve just one.