In collaboration with the EMGdotART Foundation, China Daily Video followed the filming of the second elementary school in Tiantai, which made the video headlines on June 5. The video will also be shown on a loop at the Venice International Architecture Biennale.
Tiantai No. 2 Primary School is a primary education building with a 200 meter circular running track placed on the roof of a multi-storey building. This ingenious concept was born out of the site's extremely limited land area: placing the standard 200-meter track on the rooftop allowed the school to gain an additional 3,000 square meters of public space on the ground level. If the playground had been built next to the school building in the conventional way, the 200-meter loop would have taken up 40% of the site, making the campus very small. But 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 an additional 3,000 square meters of space where students could run and have fun.
At the same time, the elliptical shape of the building gives the students a sense of inward-looking security. The placement of the running track on the roof allows for the required four stories, which is in harmony with the surrounding buildings. In order to provide more usable green courtyard space, the building block is rotated to create a fifteen degree angle to the site boundary, thus creating several small plaza spaces between the exterior of the building and the site boundary.
Learn more at: Primary School with Rooftop Runway | Zhejiang Tiantai Second Primary School
