A Threshold stacks a "school within a school" on six Pune floors

Bengaluru-based firm A Threshold completed City Pride School in 2025 as a six-story building, a vertical format forced by the scarce land and high commercial value of its site in Ravet Pradhikaran, a newly developed, densely populated district of Pune. Lead architect Avinash Ankalge and his team responded with a design philosophy they describe as a "school within a school" — an attempt to make a tall building feel small to the children inside it. Photographs of the finished building are by Pranit Bora Studio.

The core problem is one of arithmetic. A compact plot in a high-rise urban neighborhood cannot deliver the horizontal open and communal areas that a conventional school campus spreads across its grounds. Build out and you lose the little land there is; build up and you risk corridors that feel like office towers. A Threshold chose to build up, then worked to undo the sense of scale that height usually produces.

How do you make six floors feel intimate?

The mechanism, as the architects explain it, is structural rather than decorative. The building is organized so that its spatial scales are perceived as intimate rather than monumental. Instead of one large institution stacked vertically, the design reads as a set of smaller environments nested inside the whole — hence the phrase "school within a school."

That framing carries a practical logic. Children experience a school at the scale of their classroom, their corridor, their gathering spot. If those pieces stay small and legible, the overall height of the building matters less to a seven-year-old than the quality of the space they actually occupy. The architects state that this approach aims to cultivate a self-sufficient educational setting, one that promotes a sense of community and interconnectedness despite the vertical stacking.

In other words, the design substitutes vertical proximity for horizontal sprawl. What a courtyard joins on the ground, a well-sequenced stack must join in section — and the firm's bet is that the social function of shared space survives the translation if the scale stays human.

Why the site dictated the section

Ravet Pradhikaran is not a district where schools can assume generous plots. The area is characterized by densely populated urban neighborhoods on newly developed land, and that context put two pressures on the brief from the start: too little space and too much commercial value per square foot to spend it on single-story footprints.

The six-story design is the direct outcome. The architects note that these conditions "necessitated a six-story design, limiting the availability of horizontal open and communal areas." The response was not to fight the constraint but to reframe it — accepting the height while rejecting the institutional scale that usually comes with it.

This is a familiar tension in fast-growing Indian urban fringe districts, where schools, hospitals and housing all compete for the same compact plots. City Pride School offers one answer: treat density as a given and design the interior experience against it.

What the project signals

For A Threshold, led on this project by Avinash Ankalge, the school is a test of whether vertical education architecture can hold onto the communal qualities that low-rise campuses deliver by default. The firm's own description positions the building as self-sufficient and community-oriented — claims the completed 2025 project will now face in daily use by its students.

As Indian cities continue to densify their fringes, the Ravet Pradhikaran model — intimate scale stacked six stories high — is likely to become less an exception and more the working condition for school design.