Educational space is essentially a place for education, the foundation and support of education, which runs through all stages of life and is closely related to the physical and mental growth of each individual. Under the environment of rapid urbanization, we have been continuously researching on educational spaces, basing our design on the grasp of physical and mental characteristics of different age groups. Combining the design practices of several primary and secondary schools, such as Haishu School in Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City, Yiwu New Century Foreign Language School, Tiantai No.2 Primary School, and Lishui Wenyuan School, we have explored how to design primary and secondary schools in high-density urban environments from the perspective of the behavioral needs of the users, through 1) the "small scale" at the planning level, 2) the "pro-user" at the level of architectural elements, and 3) the "small scale" at the level of the user's behavior. We discuss how to respond to the behavioral needs of users in the design of primary and secondary schools in high-density urban environments through three strategies: (1) "small scale" at the planning level, (2) "pro-user" at the architectural level, and (3) "connectivity" at the building design level.
With the further concentration of urban resources in order to increase competitiveness, the density of a large number of Chinese cities continues to intensify, causing the density of primary and secondary schools and the corresponding density of single-school teachers and students to increase further. As a result, the problems of insufficient land and limited activity space faced by the planning and construction of campuses are constantly highlighted, while the intensive nature of high density largely limits the space for the design of primary and secondary schools in terms of spatial scale, flow, and behavior patterns.
Yet high density is not the root cause of the above problems; it is an end result that presents itself. It is the structural organization that determines the spatial organization that is the core problem: the inherent hierarchy of school education management makes campus design often start with a top-down mindset of managers, pursuing effective management and management safety. The institutional hierarchy forms the planning hierarchy, and a series of design methods such as axes, static and dynamic partitioning, and the planning of three zones for teaching, movement and living are all reflections of this design mindset. This starting point ignores the behavioral needs of students, who are the majority of actual users, and their corresponding spatial requirements.
Therefore, in the process of design practice, we constantly try to explore the design approach of primary and secondary schools in high-density environments from the perspective of user behavior, and summarize the corresponding three major coping strategies and their fine-tuned responses.
Small Scale
The essence of paying attention to small scale is to abandon the top-down management thinking mentioned above from the beginning of planning and design, and instead pay attention to the spatial perception and usage needs of the actual users of each primary and secondary school campus building - primary and secondary school students - in a bottom-up manner. Based on our research and interviews with students at the beginning of each design practice, this demand is clear: we oppose the oppressive and boring space of large scale buildings, and love the campus that can constantly stimulate "chance encounters" and "fun" with a strong "sense of change". They prefer a campus space with a strong sense of "change" that can stimulate "encounters" and "fun".
The underlying reason for this claim is the antagonistic contradiction between limited space and extremely long usage time:
1. Primary and secondary schools in high-density environments do not have the same amount of space as university campuses and often have extremely limited land;
2. Almost all students are required to live in a campus environment for three to six, or even nine, years. How can the above dichotomy be most effectively addressed?
Create Spatial Complexity That Is Proportional to the Length of Use by the User.
Our core strategy is to create a campus space of high complexity and spatial ephemerality by combining small-scale architectural spaces. However, how to resolve the strong mutually exclusive relationship between small scale and high density, two characteristics of contemporary urban architecture? There are three approaches.
1. Prototypes and Variables
The strategy of small scale refers to the combination of a large number of repeated or non-repeated small volume buildings and spaces, in the process of finding a unified prototype, and on this basis, seeking the greatest change in architectural elements and design language. Take the Haishu School in Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City as an example, this school, which was put into use last year, has 27 classes of elementary school and 12 classes of kindergarten, with a total building scale of 28,000 square meters. In order to fully restore the intention of the "fairy tale town" in the children's drawings at the beginning of the design, the design refined the unified prototype of small houses with sloping roofs, as well as the changing colors, the size of the small houses, and the varying width of the streets. In the design, the 15 small buildings with sloped roofs form a combination of the unified archetypes, and the above variables are varied to the greatest extent, thus forming the overall spatial logic of the campus.
Small volume is not the same as small scale, purely large buildings will be dismantled, demolition of small design methods to treat the symptoms but not the root cause, the key to its design in the "dissolution of the architectural scale": any campus building, there will be
1) Urban scale at the campus planning level;
2) Architectural scale at the monolithic level as well;
3) The scale of the architectural elements formed by the basic unit elements of the building, i.e. stairs, roofs, terraces, interfaces, etc.
The change in density will redefine the organization between the three mentioned above.
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In the context of high urban density, each "architectural element" is given more functions and definitions beyond its base, and the relationship between the three scales will change from linear to a closed-loop system. The ultimate solution to the problems posed by density will come from the scale of the "building elements" rather than the scale of the building itself. Therefore, the density of usable building elements in the overall layout, whether they can exist beyond the building monolith and form their own interconnected system, is the key criterion for the small scale strategy in our design, which will be highlighted in the second strategy "building elements".
2. Bearish but not Realistic
The small scale design strategy tends to make the design more focused on the building monolith itself and ignore the Void as the remaining space of the physical space. If we go back to the users themselves to quantify the analysis, we will find that each student spends at least one-third to more than half of the school day in this Void space, and the 40% building density of educational buildings will determine that this remaining space accounts for more than 60% of the volume.
To look at the empty space but not the real one, i.e. to pay attention to whether the Void space itself creates a sense of small-scale experience at the overall planning and layout level, and then eliminates the sense of insecurity. In practice, we found that the lack of space enclosure and line of sight penetration is the most detrimental to the above experience. Therefore, the design of Haishu School intentionally made the kindergarten, elementary school and junior high school buildings semi-enclosed and open towards the main street in the middle, and at the same time, the layout was rotated to resolve the situation of "seeing all the way to the end", so that the end of all the sight lines fall on the single building that can be reached by walking.
3. Local Small Wins Big
The planning and design of campus buildings in a high-density environment is a game of space and a mathematical problem: the layout of the plan ultimately satisfies a volume ratio equation. We have found in our practice that it is impossible to satisfy this equation by making the whole campus small-scale. The strategy to cope with this situation is to maximize and idealize the small-scale space experience in some parts of the campus, while strategically abandoning the small-scale demands of the remaining buildings and making them the most efficient, even though it may lead to a large building volume in this part of the campus. This is the local "small wins big".
Take the design of Yiwu New Century Foreign Language School as an example, the building density of the whole campus, which includes 48 classes of elementary school and 24 classes of middle school, is 1.4, far exceeding the average standard of 0.8. How to "stuff an elephant into a refrigerator" and arrange a large number of teaching space units in a reasonable combination on the site, while satisfying the small scale of the campus is the core issue of our architectural planning.
To address this issue, the design begins with a strategic abandonment at the small-scale strategy level: according to its own sunlight, light, ventilation and orientation conditions, the functional modules such as the academic building, dormitory, and wind and rain playgrounds are integrated and arranged in a number of cubes above the second floor that have an enclosed inner courtyard or indoor through-height space.
The first floor of the whole campus follows the scale of the traditional streets in Yiwu, and the sloping roofs are arranged and combined as a prototype, and "streets", "alleys", "courtyards", "pocket parks" and other interesting and friendly places are placed to strengthen the "sense of community" of the campus. The "streets", "alleys", "courtyards", "pocket parks" and other interesting and friendly places have been introduced to strengthen the "sense of community" of the campus, and the "streets and alleys" are connected to each other. Such a local arrangement strategy of "small is better than large" concentrates a large number of homogeneous teaching units, leaving the saved land space for public teaching units and small-scale creation of public space.
The original article, "A Study of Three Strategies for Designing Elementary and Secondary Schools in High-Density Environments," was published in Architecture of the Ages, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2019
