A School Named After a Warrior Princess
In the rural Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, an elliptical sandstone building rises out of the dunes like something between a fortress and an egg. This is the Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls School, built to accommodate 400 girls from kindergarten through tenth grade, most from families living below the poverty line in a region where, as of the school’s opening, female literacy barely touched 36 per cent.
The school takes its name from Rajkumari Ratnavati, a Jaisalmer princess and daughter of Maharawal Ratan Singh. According to local history, when her father left the Jaisalmer fort during a Delhi Sultanate siege, Ratnavati was entrusted with defending it and, disguised as a soldier, took roughly a hundred enemy troops hostage, including one of the invading general’s own commanders. Bards and informal records credit her with observing humanitarian conventions even amid the siege, ensuring that captured enemy soldiers were still given food and rations. Centuries later, her name was chosen for a school built to give a new generation of girls in the region a very different kind of fortress, one built for learning rather than war.
Commissioned With a Larger Vision in Mind
The school was commissioned by CITTA, a non-profit organisation that supports development work in economically challenged, remote and marginalised communities around the world, and designed pro bono by New York-based architect Diana Kellogg. It is the first of three buildings planned for the site, together known as the GYAAN Centre, which will eventually also include The Medha, a performance and exhibition space with a library and museum and The Women’s Cooperative, where local artisans will teach weaving and embroidery to mothers and other women in the community.
True to its community-driven mission, the school itself was built almost entirely by local craftsmen, many of them the fathers of the girls who would go on to study there, using hand-carved local sandstone. Kellogg has said she was struck by the beauty of Jaisalmer and by how difficult it is to build in its climate, and that learning about the challenges facing women and girls in the region reaffirmed her belief that education transforms not just individuals but entire communities.
Beating the Desert Without a Single Air Conditioner
The building’s defining achievement is not its shape but what that shape allows it to do without: mechanical cooling of any kind. Despite summer temperatures in the region reaching 50 degrees Celsius, the school provides an ambient, pleasant space for students without relying on any artificial or mechanical climate control. The design achieves this through a layered set of passive strategies drawn largely from centuries-old desert building traditions.
The first line of defence is the material itself. The building’s sandstone facade, quarried and hand-carved locally, gives the school its golden colour while also providing thermal mass that helps cool the interiors; the dense stone absorbs heat slowly during the day and releases it gradually once temperatures drop at night, delaying the peak heat from ever fully reaching the classrooms inside.
Moisture plays its own cooling role. The classroom interiors are finished in lime plaster rather than modern cement-based finishes, a material that helps regulate humidity and temperature as it interacts with the desert air.
The building’s silhouette is not just symbolic but functional. Seen from above, the ellipse-shaped structure resembles an egg in the desert, evoking female strength, but on a practical level its curved form is designed to encourage the circulation of wind throughout the building. Perforated stone jali screens, referencing patterns found in Jaisalmer’s historic forts, allow air to pass through while filtering out direct sun, offering both privacy and comfort inside. As wind is channelled and accelerated through these narrower openings, it speeds up on its way through the interior, a version of the Venturi effect that architects and engineers use to describe how air flows faster through a constriction, helping draw a steady breeze through the building’s classrooms.
Hot air, meanwhile, is given somewhere to go. The school’s higher volumes place vents at elevated positions, allowing warm air to escape upward and out of the building rather than settling and accumulating in the spaces where students sit, a passive strategy known as the stack effect, in which rising hot air naturally draws cooler air in behind it. The design team also oriented the building to maximise the prevailing wind while keeping direct sunlight to a minimum, and supplemented the passive systems with solar panels that power the building’s lighting and fans.
Even the building’s site preparation was designed with the region’s harsh water scarcity in mind. The design team followed local, centuries-old water harvesting techniques to capture and store rainwater and recycle greywater on site, and built the roof with recycled ceramic tile, using local materials for roughly 95 per cent of construction.
Kellogg has acknowledged, though, that these techniques aren’t universally transferable: their effectiveness would vary by location, since wind direction and the properties of local sandstone regulate temperature differently from one site to the next.
Uniforms Built to Last
Acclaimed Indian designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee was brought on to design the students’ uniforms, using Ajrak, a traditional regional textile block-printed with natural dyes using a technique that predates modern history. The uniforms were deliberately designed with room to grow into, allowing a single set to remain wearable across several years, a small but practical nod to the economic realities many of the school’s families face.
More Than a Building
More than 400 girls in the Jaisalmer district now study at the school, many of them first-generation learners, and staff at the school describe a visible shift in the students over time, from shyness toward a newfound confidence and eagerness to learn. As the surrounding GYAAN Centre’s remaining two buildings take shape, the vision extends beyond architecture and beyond a single generation of students, toward a broader effort to weave sustainable design, traditional craft and women’s empowerment into a single, standing structure in the heart of the Thar Desert.
References:
- Archello. “The Rajkumari Ratnavati Girl’s School,” Diana Kellogg Architects.
- Divisare. “The GYAAN Centre - Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls School,” Diana Kellogg Architects, Vinay Panjwani.
- Architecture Hunter. “Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls School by Diana Kellogg Architects,” November 2024.
- Åvontuura. “Diana Kellogg Architects design sustainable Girl’s School out of sandstone in the Thar Desert,” April 2021.
- Upworthy. “A new school for girls in India stays cool in 120-degree desert heat without air conditioning,” 2026.
- CNN. “How this school in the Indian desert stays cool even in extreme heat,” 2023.
- Wikipedia. “Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls School.”
- ArchitectureLive! “The Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls’ School, Jaisalmer, by Diana Kellogg Architects,” January 2022.
- TheAPN. “Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls School: A Desert Jewel Reimagining Architecture, Culture, and Empowerment,” March 2026.
- Rajputana Collective. “A Gem Amidst the Thar,” March 2024.
- EBNW Story. “Jaisalmer Rajkumari Ratnawati Lives In The Hearts Of Millions Via Her Stories Of Valour And Bravery,” June 2021.
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