Our Campus
Not far away from the city, LBC is located in a campus spread over four acres of land on a hill top with a picturesque surrounding, abundant with greenery. The first group of seven buildings in the campus was designed by Laurie Baker.
During the last years of his life, Laurie Baker was involved in designing and building a campus for one of his friends, Keith Saldanha, who wanted to start an innovative centre, named ‘Navayatra’, for children's education about nature and the wider world beyond the school curriculum. However, Mr. Saldanha found it difficult to carry on the activities and he offered the land to LBC, which was looking for an appropriate location. LBC, with a one-time grant from the Government of Kerala, bought the land along with the buildings and started functioning from the present campus on October 3rd, 2009.
The campus has a few brick structures, built along the contours of the terrain, a network of creative walkways, and rain water collection tanks, constructed at different strata of the land according to the flow of rain water.
The brick structures include a two-storey administrative building that runs on solar power, a mess hall that can accommodate around 80 people, a classroom that can seat 25 to 30 participants, a dormitory and guest rooms that can accommodate 24 people at a time, an extension of the office block that has been partly built by students as a part of the summer school programme, a security guard room, a pavilion with bamboo reinforced concrete roof and a watch tower that is a rainwater harvesting tank.
The campus also has an open air theatre and ample open ground for conducting practical sessions. The lush greenery in the campus has also been consciously developed and nurtured through numerous plants and trees that have been planted over the years. Organic farming has also been initiated, and the campus has a rich collection of plants including coconut, papaya, banana, yam, turmeric, ginger, cardamom, jackfruit, cherry, pepper, mango, guava, cashew nut, etc. Various other trees and plants cover the entire campus a part of which is kept as a kind of 'forest' area.
Adjacent to the LBC campus is the training facility centre owned and managed by the Self Employed Women's Association, Trivandrum (SEWA-T), which is an association of self-employed women workers affiliated to the all India SEWA. The campus of SEWA also houses beautiful brick structures including an auditorium with 150 seats, a dormitory with an occupancy capacity of 60, three guestrooms with double beds and a cafeteria with a seating capacity of 60, designed and built by COSTFORD under the direct supervision of Laurie Baker during 2002-04.