Project Description

Mymensingh city is known as 'শিক্ষানগরী', yet students here live under relentless academic pressure. From dawn to night they move between tuition, school, and coaching, trapped in a rigid routine. In this cycle, they forget that a world exists beyond textbooks. A space that offers alternative books, free conversations, and moments of pause becomes a much-needed healing point for them.  

Beside the railway station, abandoned train carriages have stood for over twelve years, rusting, unsafe, and misused. At the same time, Town Hall Mor holds a 240 sqm void, politically conflicted through cycles of murals built and destroyed. By relocating one of the abandoned carriages to this site, two wounds are addressed together: the forgotten object is reborn, and the conflicted civic space is reclaimed.

Inside the carriage, interventions are minimal but intentional: shelves of storybooks, soft seating, corners for meditation, group discussions, playful elements like helium balloons, even a ladder to climb onto the roof. These gestures create a therapeutic landscape where students shift from stress to flow, engage with biophilic light and air, and rediscover joy in community.

This small act of adaptive reuse is also placemaking transforming a scarred void into a shared sanctuary for care and belonging. Through this project we have held onto the triple focus of the competition: People (mental well-being and joy), Community (a shared ground for students), and Planet (adaptive reuse as ecological healing).