Huangzhou Art school
Eagle Studio, A place to Dream, Art and Culture
What
The Eagle Artist studio is a community for artist training located in Hangzhou. The 70,000sqm campus is designed to accommodate over 3000 students as an intensive 8 month tuition preparing for college entrance exam to tier one arts institutions within mainland china. We look to the building as a ‘dream factory’ a spacial model for an arts community helping to fulfill the ambition of its temporary users.
Idea Concept
This factory required us to focus on many of the places and spaces in‐between art centered activities focusing on emotions relating to study, compete, dwell and to dream. We hope to facilitate the best opportunities for social exchange for these students.
Bringing together the social values of a campus masterplan, the idea was to optimize social experience and program exchange at any point of the campus. Where activities such as class studying, studio painting, lecture’s, dining, sports and resting, are interlocked and dispersed into the public realm. This way visual links and architectural gestures can act subliminally to prompt interaction / communication / and an identity through shared purpose. The building should be seen as a three dimensional grid where effort has been made to fundamentally confuse interior and exterior boundaries. Being neither inside nor outside, a permanent state of transition is cultivated.
Accommodation
Instead of the low density sprawl of the traditional campus, the buildings are arranged to celebrate one continuous volume of spaces vertically. All 3000 Students are accommodated for arts related study centrally on a single level accessed by long ramps through a central circulation hub. This enables visibility between drawing classes for teaching convenience and promotes the competitive atmosphere which will define their hopes for acceptance in highly desired institutions A 6m volume allows for optimum study conditions enhanced by diffused natural daylight, integrated through a serrated louver system which can be seen expressed on the facade. It must also be added that the space mirrors the environment which students will sit their exams often in large spaces naturally lit and partially external in in large numbers.
Huangzhou being very temperate in climate much use is made of outdoor space for both teaching and leisure. Students Classrooms occupy the second and Ground floors with abundant shaded Breakout/social interactive spaces. The basement contains canteen and sports facilities which are naturally lit through two large light tunnels and a central courtyard circulation hub. The campus dormitory loops around the perimeter of the site and forms a shaded internal street,
split by a large Campus square. The Studio accommodation block lowers to accommodate a stepped auditorium for impromptu events or drawing classes also allowing circulation up into the Visitors Centre and Drawing space.
Wrap up
For this large school, if the focus is to create a collective place that would mean the individual feel connect and link to each other. Through the loose boundaries between classroom/ studios and recreational spaces it can enable a co‐ownership, perhaps a sense of home, between the school and its inhabitants. We treat architecture at smaller human scales both teachers and Students have an essence of control, perhaps defined more as temporary occupation opportunities. As Herman Herzberg commented “Place implies a special value added to a space, it has a particular meaning for a number of people who feel attached to one another or derive from it a feeling of a solidarity.”
