On September 2, 2014, the day after the opening of primary and secondary schools in China, "Tiantai No. 2 Primary School" designed by LYCS Architecture was featured on the official website of the New York Times.
The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York, the United States, distributed around the world, has considerable influence, the United States senior newspaper, a representative of serious publications, has a long history of good credibility and authority.
"The second elementary school in Tiantai is surrounded by multi-story apartment buildings, and a 200-meter-long track was built on the roof. One of the photos shows children in school uniforms running wildly around the five-lane track with smiles on their faces. "People's Daily" has published an article praising the project as the first of its kind in China. Xinhua also described the school as an elementary school where land is scarce, and CCTV news said "the track was built to solve a space problem."
Tiantai Elementary School No. 2 is an elementary school with a standard running track built on the roof, a subversive design approach that will hopefully provide a model for urban renewal to follow.
The clever concept of placing the 200m circular track on the roof of a multi-storey primary education building was born out of the site's extremely limited land area: by placing the standard 200m track on the roof, the school gained an additional 3,000m2 of public space on the ground. If the playground had been built next to the school building in the conventional way, the 200-meter circular track would have taken up 40% of the site and the campus would have been very tight. However, the students needed a playground to play sports, so the design placed the standard 200-meter track on top of the school building, giving the school more than 3,000 square meters of activity space where students can run and have fun. At the same time, the elliptical shape of the school building gives students a sense of inward-looking security.
Learn more at With Land S: Carce, Chinese School Builds Rooftop Track - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
