FUTIAN high school campus / reMIX studio – .

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Text description provided by the architects. Futian High School Campus is a revolutionary boarding school model located in the heart of Shenzhen, China’s most modern and dynamic metropolis. Its uniqueness comes from multiple factors: a context of extreme urban conditions, a very high density and a program configuration allowing most of the facilities to be shared with neighbors, make the Futian Campus a prototype of a “new city within the city”.

The context. In 1980, when Shenzhen obtained the status of “special economic zone”, the city was no more than a collection of fishing villages with a total population of 300,000 inhabitants benefiting from a strategic geographical position due to its coastline. extensive and its proximity to Hong Kong. . Thanks to its special status, the city has experienced the fastest urbanization process in the history of humanity and today has nearly 18 million inhabitants. This unprecedented urban growth has had positive and negative effects: on the one hand, it has encouraged 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 the scarcity of available soil – for reference Shenzhen and Beijing have a similar population, but Shenzhen only covers 1/8 of the surface area of ​​Beijing – and to the lack public facilities, particularly schools. , which have failed to keep pace with the growth of the rest of the city. To make up for this deficit, over the past five years, the local government has built more than 200 new schools.

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Futian is located in the very center of the new metropolis. Within a radius of a few kilometers around the school, one can observe the greatest variety of urban fabrics: in the distance the lands of the Hong Kong green reserve, the urban village of Futian (one of the rare vestiges of the old city) in the immediate vicinity, already surrounded by new residential towers over 100 meters high, the new Central Park opposite and on the other side of the park, the imposing skyscrapers of the CBD. In this context, the school site, enclosed on three sides by tall buildings, presented itself as one of the last low-density plots valued by the new development. The city’s quest for innovation was echoed in the call for competition for the Futian high school, through a new urban manifesto entitled “8+1 – Action plan for the new Futian campus”. The competition brief asked architects to fundamentally rethink the idea of ​​“campus” and explore new typologies of schools that had to cope with unprecedented density and an evolving education system; in other words rethinking what a contemporary school campus should be and how it can function locally, by proposing new hybrid typologies that allow a stronger dialogue with its neighboring community.

Urban strategy. The higher volumes of the teaching towers and dormitories are placed along the eastern and southern boundaries of the site, creating a clear connection to the skyline of adjacent buildings and a soft, degrading transition to the urban void of the park. The imposing volume of the dormitories (120 m long and 50 m high) is divided by a series of vertical and horizontal sections which articulate the volume and reduce its scale to blend into the built fabric of the adjacent urban village. Unlike most Chinese schools arranged around a central point (usually the sports field), the buildings on the Futian campus face outwards: through a series of visual corridors, all volumes open onto fascinating views of Futian Central Park and the CBD. So the students are no longer isolated from the city, but they are active spectators of the surrounding city.

A school without a fence: sharing facilities with neighbors. To meet all the functional requirements of the project on a relatively small site, a crucial design decision was to raise the running track 7.4m above road level, creating a thick podium which accommodates all the most important pieces of the program, organized around a series of lessons that create a porous mat structure. This configuration allowed the creation of an unusual urban interface: rather than the standard blind fence, the school boundary along the main road is a transparent façade which provides direct access to a series of semi-public amenities . On weekends or for special events, a set of indoor and semi-outdoor basketball, volleyball and badminton courts, a gym, a swimming pool, an exhibition space and a 1 000 places (total 13,600 m2 of public program) can all be opened to external users, transforming the school from an airtight bubble into a civic center.

In response to the irregular shape of the venue, the running track at the top of the podium is rotated 15 degrees counterclockwise from the ideal north-south orientation to create a smoother connection with the buildings surrounding it. As a result, a triangular square is formed on the southwest corner of the plot, where the main gate is located. The entrance plaza is designed to provide generous space for heavy student and parent traffic during school hours, but, especially in the evening, it also provides a new active space open for public use. A grand staircase connects the street to the sports field levels, allowing the facility to function as a true professional district level stadium with covered seating capacity for over 3,000 spectators. The public circulation design includes plans for a future pedestrian bridge addition that would create a direct connection between the stadium and the park.

Mediator of extreme density. Futian Campus is a boarding school for a community of 3,000 students with a gross area of ​​120,000 m2 on a plot of 41,000 m2. The project began with the renovation of an existing school, but the original floor space had to be quadrupled, making any preservation strategy impossible. With such figures, meeting optimal solar conditions, adequate natural ventilation, fire safety and other strict normative requirements was already a great achievement, but the most difficult design objective was to mitigate the feeling of oppression that such a high density could easily generate. For this scope, the reMIX strategy focused on two main principles: maximizing porosity and “multiplying soils”.

Achieving 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 the conditions subtropical climates where natural ventilation is crucial. , but it is also a way of creating new semi-outdoor spaces which operate on a human scale and help to break up the imposing monumentality of the whole. In the same spirit, by “multiplying the land”, the massification process aims to create as many active surfaces as possible, by dividing the volumes of the building and moving them onto different interconnected levels. It is a spatial strategy that generates a distributed network of outdoor spaces and constantly evolving nodal filters across a wide variety of connections and enclosure typologies, smoothing the transition between landscape and buildings.

The loop: much more than a circulation system. The loop, however, is not just a circulation system and it is certainly not driven solely by efficiency; none of the connections are straight or follow shortest path principles. Rather, it is a three-dimensional combination of diverse social spaces (lounge areas, outdoor classrooms, lecture halls, roof gardens, etc.) designed to promote curiosity and inspire spontaneous activities and exchanges among students , somehow recreating all the interesting informal interactions that happen in the city. In other words, the loop is a winding “social shift” designed to organize life on campus, privileging diverse individual experiences despite social segregation.

An ecological campus. The futien the campus is located along a very important corridor for migratory birds. At the old school, during the migration season, students could observe large flocks of birds resting on the grass of the sports field – one of the reasons why the specifications called for a grass football field. The new volume of the campus degrading towards the park makes it a bird-friendly ecosystem. While the podium’s multiple courtyards and gardens are designed to meet stormwater management strategies and human needs, the green roofs of the teaching towers are primarily designed for birds. A three-dimensional system of green spaces creates an interconnected ecological infrastructure. Green system design serves multiple functional purposes: providing food for migratory birds, rain gardens, and botanical display areas provide environmental benefits as well as valuable educational materials for students.