Traditional school planning in modern Chinese cities usually provides students and children with an adult-scale campus environment at an excessively early stage. Such environment gives no help to them in coping with high educational and social pressure. Facing these phenomenon, it is the architects’ responsibility to subversively break these conventions in school planning and offer children with space of their own scale and age in which they will enjoy living and studying.
The project of Hangzhou Haishu School with a kindergarten and a primary school, is located in Hangzhou.The architecture and interior design are both designed by LYCS Architecture.It is inspired by a random impromptu child drawing that depicts his ideal school which is like a small town full of small scale spaces and “happy” streets.Based on this inspiration, we divided the 28000sqm campus into 15 much smaller scale gabled volume. The scale of each volume gradually increases according to the growth of children’s age and the variation in their behaviors. A comfortable campus environment is formed by small inner courtyards within and among these volumes.
All the functional spaces are connected in series through corridors, inner courtyards and corridors of different opening degrees. Exposed stairs and corridors shaped dynamically are not only designed for circulation, but also for plenty of activity spaces. As a mini society, the school enables students to build their own social consciousness with daily experience.
Adhering to a special variation in scale, the design of this entire campus closely follows the growth and emotion of its users.The design notion of “the story of a small town” will allow students and children to enjoy their own fairy tale like campus.