Taihu New Town Primary School

Suzhou, China

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Taihu New Town Primary School

Suzhou, China

Firm

MINAX

Type

Educational › Elementary School

YEAR

2012

Photographs: Lu Zhigang

The site is located at the heart of Taihu New Town, Wuxi which is potential as a bustling city center in future. Through the building site segmentation, arrangement and configuration, proposed school was intended to engrave the continuing memory between human and nature within current rapid urbanization in the area.

Imagery of clouds at the entrance hall gradually expands into school to become a continuous process of change. Originally a corridor with only function of traffic is designed as planned structure of main trail, like naturally extension and transition of tree trunks within the building site to connect different functional spaces, which itself has become a public space with multiple significances. Single buildings with slightly change on its form are distributed at the intersection points in appropriate distances, this four teaching blocks are surrounding courtyard and constitute the main teaching area. Every single building is formed by stacked in and out boxes, whereas south facing corridor is integrated with dense louvers which arrange in uneven patterns to compose the profile of clouds, correspond to shaded roofs as floating clouds on the corridors. In fact, the imageries of cloud are looming within the building. The end of this sequence is carried through by service block and multifunction block, and architectural boundaries are slowly eliminated throughout the undulated topography.

The traditional school model is changed and introduced by innovative style of language and technique of configuration, thus the study environment has become a vibrant activity spaces full of artistic sense and fun. While the disappearance of artistic sense in idyllic period, new architectural concepts desire to evoke people’s expectation on interesting architectural spaces and influence their understanding of life imperceptibly, and introducing new and exciting changes on the education mode, human behavior and even other broader aspects.

The most significant of architecture’s implication on human development is mostly concentrated in education buildings. Majority of education buildings in China are subject to regulate mode in education and builders of adult’s perception on aesthetic, always emerged solemn form of teaching method. Due to the reason of incapability on transformation of vast education system shortly, we can actually make the education building’s design to be focus on respecting nature and general aesthetic. The implication of architecture for adult and children are totally different, therefore merging essential beauty and change in nature through implementation of physical and abstract elements, thus achieves a sense of touch and feel on poetic narrative.