With the December press release announcing a series of modular tents meant to be utilized as schools, clinics, and emergency shelters for displaced communities, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) included a series of photos. In one, smiling, happy children are sitting at their desks underneath sloping, windsail-like arches, the distinctly modern combination of aluminum frame and taut, white “tent” fabric.
When I visited one of the ZHA-designed schools in Pakistan in March, it looked like the picture come to life. Thirty-two students, mainly internally displaced people (IDPs) who had been uprooted by floods and earthquakes, were lined up in their seats, the heat and sun of the outside diminished by the white walls.
Nestled in a craggy hillside on the outskirts of Islamabad, the school isn’t where you might expect it to be. It’s hidden away inside a brand-new private housing development, one of many in Pakistan, where faulty state infrastructure and chaotic urban centers are driving a growing middle class into private “societies” that function as their own cities.
How the school ended up in such a place is telling: Zaha Hadid Architects originally designed it in collaboration with an NGO called Education Above All, a foundation created by Qatar’s former first lady, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, for a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey. Education Above All aimed to bring a pilot of the tent school to Pakistan through another NGO called Alight, which identified a need for a school in the area. A private housing society obliged and donated some land. And, thus, an award-winning architecture firm’s structure found
