Creating Safe and Comfortable Learning Spaces for Women
Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School, Marzar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

Located in the center of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, the new Gohar Khatoon Girls' School serves upwards of 3,000 K-12 students a day. As the country’s largest school for girls, Gohar Khatoon is an important gateway to higher education, while also providing a much-needed place for local women and girls to navigate Afghanistan’s transition towards greater gender inclusivity. Gohar Khatoon is designed to support this process by promoting stability, comfort, and community engagement.

As school is sometimes the only place where women are permitted to socialize outside the home, Gohar Khatoon’s outdoor activity spaces give students a culturally acceptable space for physical fitness with gathering areas designed to promote social interaction. Additionally, while art in Afghanistan has historically been produced almost entirely by men, women have recently been encouraged to pursue artistic interests. As part of the Gohar Khatoon project, a mural competition provided emerging local female artists an opportunity to share their work and inspire students.

The school is designed with passive strategies to withstand Mazar-i-Sharif’s harsh climate, where winters are extremely cold and summers can be sweltering. A central stairwell in each classroom block forms a “sunspace” that captures heat for warming the building in winter. Operable vents and door transoms allow warm air to circulate through the north-facing classrooms. South-facing classrooms receive enough direct solar gain to operate autonomously. Cooling during the summer and shoulder seasons is achieved with a combination of cross and stack ventilation. Large seasonal doors at the end of the sunspaces can be opened in the warmer months, and transoms over the central hallways help pull air through the building.

The building’s façade takes its cues from Afghanistan’s rich history of masonry construction, with locally-produced brick a key building material. The façade balances daylighting with solar gain by relying on wall depth–as well as opening size–to maximize solar gain in winter, and to shade glass surfaces in summer. The bright colored windows draw inspiration from Mazar-i-Sharif’s famous Blue Mosque and were handmade by local artisans, with the tile and pavers also produced in the city.

2022 project update @ Architectural Record