Recently, the second elementary school in Tiantai designed by LYCS Architecture won the "American Architecture Prize" in the Education category. The project is a revolutionary design solution to the increasingly tight land use problem in the old city of urban regeneration, and brings a new approach to the problems between building and site, site and city, and form and function in today's urban design.
The american architecture prize (AAP) is one of the industry's most respected awards, designed to showcase architects of exceptional talent and vision and their work from around the world.
Tiantai No. 2 Primary School is a primary education building that places a 200-meter circular running track on the roof of a multi-story building. This clever concept was born out of the site's extremely limited land area: placing the standard 200-meter track on the roof gains the school an additional 3,000 square meters 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 building gives the students a sense of inward-looking security. The placement of the running track on the roof allows the number of floors to be limited to four, as required, 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.
