Futian Campus is a ground-breaking model of
boarding school in the heart of Shenzhen, the most modern and dynamic Chinese
metropolis. Its unicity comes from multiple factors: a context of extreme urban
conditions, a very high density, a program layout that allows the school to
have a transparent interface and most facilities to be shared with the
neighbours, together make Futian Campus a prototype of “a new city within the
city”.
The context
In 1980, when Shenzhen was given the status of
“special economic zone”, the city was little more than a cluster of fishermen
villages with a total population of 300,000 inhabitants in a strategic
geographic position due to its extended coastline and its proximity to Hong
Kong. Thanks to its special status the city has experienced the fastest process
of urbanization in human history and nowadays it hosts almost 18 million
inhabitants.
This unprecedented urban growth has had positive
and negative effects: on the one hand it has spurred the city to become the
engine of Chinese innovation (both in social and economic terms); on the other
hand it has produced phenomena of hyper-densification due to scarcity of
available soil - as a reference Shenzhen and Beijing have a similar population,
but Shenzhen has only 1/8 of Beijing’s area - and lack of public facilities,
particularly schools, which have not managed to keep up with the pace of growth
of the rest of the city. To solve this deficit, in the last five years the
local government has built more than 200 new schools.
Futian is located right at the centre of the new
metropolis. Within a radius of a few kilometres from the school, one can
observe the greatest variety of urban fabrics: Hong Kong green reserve land in
the distance, Futian urban village (one of the few remains of the old town) in
the immediate adjacency, already surrounded by new 100+ meters high residential
towers, the new Central Park in front and on the other side of the park, the
imposing skyscrapers of the CBD. In this context, the site of the school, locked
by high-rise buildings on three sides, presented itself as one of the last
plots of low density to be upgraded by the new development.
The city’s search for innovation resonated in the
competition call for Futian High School, through a new urban manifesto called
“8+1 - Futian New Campus Action Plan”. The competition brief asked architects
to fundamentally rethink the idea of “campus” and explore new school typologies
that had to address an unprecedented density and a changing educational system;
in other words rethinking what a contemporary school campus should be and how
it can operate locally, proposing new hybrid typologies that allow a stronger
dialogue with its neighbouring community.
Urban strategy
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. 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 the surrounding city.
A school without a fence:
sharing facilities with the neighbours
Traditionally Chinese schools are urban islands
with campus structures that isolate them from their neighbours and a lot of
underused facilities that for security reasons are not accessible by external
users. Futian Campus design challenges this configuration in favour of a much
more flexible management scheme that partially opens the school to the local
community.
In order to fulfil all the functional requirements of the brief in a relatively small site, one crucial design decision was to elevate the running track 7.4m above the road level, forming a thick podium that hosts all the larger pieces of the program, organized around a series of courtyards that create a porous mat structure. This configuration allowed to generate an unusual urban interface: rather than the standard blind fence, the school boundary along the main road is a transparent façade that gives direct access to a series of semi-public facilities. In the weekends or for special events, a group of indoor and semi-outdoor basketball, volleyball and badminton courts, a gym, a swimming pool, an exhibition space and a 1,000 seats
auditorium (in total 13,600 m2 of public program) can all be opened
to external users, thus transforming the school from a hermetic bubble into a civic centre.
As a response to the irregular shape of the site,
the running track on top of the podium is rotated 15 degrees anti-clockwise
from the ideal north-south orientation to create a smoother connection with the
buildings around it. As a result a triangular plaza is formed on the south-west
corner of the plot, where the main gate is located. The entrance plaza is
designed to give a generous space for the intense traffic of students and
parents in school hours, but, especially in the evenings, it is also
effectively a new active space open for public use.
A large stair connects the street with the grades
of the sports field, allowing the facility to operate as a proper professional
district-level stadium with a covered seats capacity for more than 3,000
spectators. The design of the public circulation includes the plan for a future
addition of a pedestrian bridge that would create a direct connection between
the stadium and the park.
Mediating the extreme
density
Futian Campus is a boarding school for a community
of 3,000 students with a GFA of 120,000 m2 on a plot area of 41,000
m2. The project started as a renovation of an existing school, but
the original floor area had to be quadrupled, making any preservation strategy
impossible. With such numbers, the fulfilment of optimal solar conditions,
proper natural ventilation, fire safety and other strict normative requirements
was already a big achievement, but the most challenging design goal was to
mitigate the sense of oppression that such high density could easily generate.
For this scope, reMIX’s strategy focused on two main principles: maximizing
porosity and “multiplying grounds”.
Achieving a high porosity, through the insertion of
voids of different sizes both on the vertical axis (courtyards) and on the
horizontal axis (covered terraces) is not only a valid design strategy to adapt
to sub-tropical climatic conditions where natural ventilation is crucial, but
it is also a way of creating new semi-outdoor spaces that operate at the human
scale and help break down the imposing monumentality of the overall massing.
On a similar line, by “multiplying grounds” the
massing process aims at creating as many active surfaces as possible, splitting
the building volumes and displacing them on different interconnected levels. It is a spatial strategy that generates a distributed 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 loop: much more than a
circulation system
The starting point in the design of the loop was a
practical solution to a very challenging issue: 3,000 students live in a dorm
building that reaches 13 floors of height and every morning they all need to
move at once to reach their respective classrooms. How can one make such
massive flow happen without heavily relying on elevators, not a feasible option
for a school? The solution came from splitting up the volume of the dorms to
create a public platform on the 9th floor that overviews the whole campus and
connects to all the teaching towers on the 6th and 7th floor, through a system
of bridges and stepped roofs. By splitting the high-rise buildings into two
low-rise horizontal halves, this new elevated path cuts vertical movements by
half, 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, in fact none of the
connections is straight nor follows shortest-walk principles. 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.
An ecological campus
Futian campus is located along a very important
corridor for migratory birds. In the old school, during the migration season,
students could observe big flocks of birds resting on the grass of the sports
field - one of the reason why the competition brief asked for a grass football
pitch. The new massing of the campus degrading towards the park makes it a bird
friendly eco-system.
While the multiple courtyards and gardens on the
podium are designed to address storm water management strategies and
human-related needs, the green roofs of the teaching towers are mainly designed
for the birds.
A three-dimensional system of green spaces creates an
interconnected ecological infrastructure. The design of the green system
responds to multiple functional goals: food provision for migratory birds, rain
gardens and botanical exhibition areas provide environmental benefits as well
valuable educational material for the students.