This project is in the urban renewal of 06 blocks of Tanluo Village, Dalang Street, Longhua District, Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province. On the west side of the project is Yangtai Mountain Forest Park, with the rich surrounding landscape and public cultural resources. Transportation around the site is convenient. The main road around our site is Huafa Road on the north; then there is Tanluo 1st Road on the East and Southside and Tanluo 6th Road on the west.
Our Masterplan layout sets the school in the north corner to set back from the new planned Mixed-Use complex that contains high-rise buildings 150m and 200m high. All the classrooms we oriented towards the south and south-west direction. The teaching building and Teacher's dormitory are continuous and form one L shape. We set teachers dormitory at the south-east corner to allow more privacy to them. The main entrance for students is at the south-West side near Huafa road. The car Entrance is from the North-East side, and the secondary pedestrian entrance is on the north corner, which we defined as a public plaza.
The different rooms and functions within the school have been placed to create a safe and calm environment for students. Older, Middle School, and younger Primary School students have separate entrances. They are set in different parts of the building but meet each other in the central plaza and shared room areas like canteen, indoor gym, swimming pool, and multi-function room. We also divided the student library into two parts for primary and middle school students.
"Not all the classrooms have walls."
Our proposal tries to blur the border between indoor and outdoor by creating semi-indoor and open overhead spaces. We also want to blur the boundary between teaching and leisure spaces. We maximize social spaces on the raised platform level with shared student rooms underneath. We perforated our raised platform with smaller courtyards that create a series of interconnected micro-ambiances and a system of small atriums within a big garden. On the upper floors, spaces between classrooms connect horizontally and vertically using bridges and holes and provide wind, light, and shared spaces. The idea is to shorten and increase the corridors that become spaces for socialization and less formal education, like workshops, homework areas, leisure, etc.
We based the plan layout on classroom clusters grouped in three. We filled the breaks between sets with highlight nodes: platforms and stairs that vary in forms and spaces. Each node is unique and recognizable, matching different age groups' nature and educational needs to enjoy different ambiance through the grades and create memories during the nine years of school life.
We put the Indoor gymnasium, the Swimming pool, and the Multi-function Room on the same -1 level, spreading up to the ground floor since all are double-height spaces. We allowed better interconnection of these functions by connecting them visually by glass barriers and a sunken plaza between all these facilities. In addition, the students' canteen that is on the ground floor also shares a glass wall with the indoor gymnasium which provide more daylight for both rooms.