Brick by Brick – Parijat Urja Chakra, An Outreach Initiative by Anand Foundation

Some spaces don't need to be explained through architecture alone; they need to be felt through the people who move through them. "Brick by Brick" was conceived with that belief at its core: that the truest way to understand a building is to watch how it holds the lives of those who inhabit it, day after day, unremarkably, joyfully.

The film opens in the quiet of early morning, the village of Fatehgarh stirring awake, the local gurudwara standing still, the streets empty before the day begins. Into this stillness comes something entirely ordinary for the children who live here: a car, sent by the Anand Foundation, arriving to take them to the outreach center. There is no drama in this ritual, just kids clapping hands and singing in the backseat, the car winding past farmland on a route they know by heart. The camera lingers here deliberately, because this everydayness is the point. Before we ever see the architecture, we see the life that the architecture exists to serve.

It's only when the children step out of the car that the building reveals itself, first in fragments. A window detail. A curve of brickwork catching the light. And then, as a whole: a curvilinear brick structure with a cavity cut straight through it, large enough for kids to either run past or dart through, laughing. The building doesn't announce itself with a grand establishing shot; it's discovered the way a child would discover it, playfully, at running speed, without ceremony.

From there, the film follows the children as they scatter into the spaces built for them: a science room, a computer training center, a music room, while in another area, the center reveals its second life as a vocational training space for adults, with women learning to sew and stitch, and a library holding its own quiet corner. The building, we come to realize, is not one space but many small ones, each shaped around a specific act of learning.

What makes this project a particularly compelling architectural narrative is its roof. The school is capped by domes built using a technique practiced by master masons from Rohtak for over three decades, a method requiring no steel reinforcement or shuttering. Known as Rohtak domes, these shallow brick domes rely purely on compression and craftsmanship, honed and passed down through generations of builders rather than engineered from a manual. Reflected ceiling plan style video shots encapsulate this mood and also how this architectural detail shapes the experience of the user.

But its beating heart is the central courtyard, an open space framed by modest brick walls and arches, punctuated by large circular openings that kids leap through like a game, while women sit on built-in ledges, watching over them and doing their own work. This courtyard becomes the film's emotional and visual anchor. It's where casual play, music lessons, and formal teaching coexist without friction, proof that a single, well-considered space can flex to hold an entire community's rhythm throughout the day.

One can see an actual music lesson recorded live at the shaded area of the central court. Followed by time-lapse sequences showcasing the finesse in design of the brick jaalis and the carefull cutouts in the Brick domes.

The film's final shot is where its intent comes fully into focus. As a drone rises above the courtyard, the children below are seen moving in a circle, an image that only reveals its full meaning once you know the center's name: Parijat Urja Chakra. "Urja Chakra" translates to "energy circle," and in that closing frame, the children themselves become the energy the name promises. Their movement through the central space mirrors the very idea the architecture was built around. It's the shot the entire film has been quietly building toward, where design and meaning converge in a single image.

"Brick by Brick" is a film that explains architecture while inhabiting it from within, the way its everyday users do.

The film aims to be as contextually considered as the space it documents, not simply a record of architecture and human interaction, but an attempt to find a form that could only have been made for this particular building, in this particular place, for these particular people.