LINK-ED(U): FUTIAN HIGH-SCHOOL CAMPUS
Futian High School Campus is a boarding school that challenges in many ways the traditional typology of Chinese public schools. While most campuses are often hermetic urban bubbles, fully secluded from their neighbourhoods, in Futian Campus an innovative program layout allows the school to have a transparent interface with the main road and share most of its sport and cultural facilities (in total 13,600 m2 of public program) with the neighbours, operating de facto as a civic centre during weekends and holidays.
Furthermore, the spatial design of the school transforms an extremely high density (FAR=3 means roughly three times higher than traditional models) into an opportunity to explore a prototype of “a new city within the city”. In the massing process the building volumes are split and displaced on different interconnected levels creating a decentralized network of ever changing outdoor spaces and nodal filters through a large variety of connections and typologies of enclosure, smoothening up the transition between the landscape and the buildings.
The higher volumes of the teaching towers and the dorms are placed along the east and south boundaries of the site, creating a clear connection with the skyline of the adjacent buildings and a smooth degrading transition towards the urban void of the park in front. The imposing volume of the dorms (120m long and 50m high) is divided by a series of vertical and horizontal cuts that articulate the massing and bring down its scale to blend with the built fabric of the adjacent urban village. Contrary to most Chinese schools that are arranged around a central focal point (usually the sports field), the buildings of Futian Campus are focusing outwards: through a series of visual corridors all the volumes open up to the mesmerizing views of Futian Central Park and the CBD. Thus students are not isolated from their neighbourhood anymore, but they are active spectators of their urban context.
One of the main features of the design is certainly “the loop”. By splitting the high-rise buildings into two horizontal halves interconnected by bridges, the loop drastically reduces vertical movements, allowing students living or studying in the higher floors to move across the whole campus without the need of going up and down infinite flies of stairs. The loop, though, is not just a circulation system and it is certainly not driven only by efficiency. It is rather a three-dimensional combination of diverse social spaces (seating areas, open air classrooms, amphitheatres, roof gardens, etc.) that are designed to promote curiosity and inspire spontaneous activities and exchanges between students, recreating in a way all the interesting informal interactions that occur in the city. In other words, the loop is a meandering “social bend” designed to organize the campus life, privileging diverse individual experiences in spite of social segregation.
