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Futian Campus is a complex project so the final layout is a synthesis of multiple principles:
- No fence - unlike traditional Chinese schools that are isolated from the city, Futian Campus has a transparent interface and shares most of its facilities with the neighbours.
- Extreme density, but not oppressive - despite an FAR roughly 3 times higher than standard schools, the massing is organized along a series of visual corridors towards Futian Central Park that let the campus “breath”.
- Decentralized public space at a human scale - as many active surfaces as possible are created by splitting the building volumes on different interconnected levels, generating a distributed network of flexible semi-outdoor spaces with varied spatial conditions that students can activate with multiple uses.
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Futian district has some of the most extreme urban conditions. Our design addresses them in three ways: - in the overall massing, we created a relatively smooth transition between the skyline of the new 100+ meters high residential towers on the east and the urban void of the Central Park on the west. - in the dorms, which is the largest building of the campus along the southern boundary of the site, we produced a series of vertical and horizontal cuts that break down the long volume into smaller fragments that better blend with the scale of the adjacent urban village. - at the façade level, the use of second skins that work as abstract surface rather than compositional elements creates a “quiet” response to the “noisy” context.
The campus adapts to the sub-tropical conditions of Shenzhen climate by mitigating high density through maximum porosity: the insertion of voids of different sizes both on the vertical axis (courtyards) and on the horizontal axis (covered terraces) generates an efficient natural ventilation system that allows the school to operate some of the large programs without AC: e.g. most sports facilities in the ground floor and part of the canteen are covered semi-outdoor spaces with a pleasant micro-climate throughout the year. In terms of ecology, Futian campus is located along a very important corridor for migratory birds. The massing of the campus degrading towards the park makes it a bird friendly eco-system and the green roofs of the teaching towers are designed to provide food for the birds.
In traditional Chinese schools most facilities for security reasons are not accessible by external users and are often underused. Our design instead opens the school to the local community. The running track is elevated 7.4m above the road level and thick podium hosts all the larger pieces of the program. This configuration allowed us to generate an unusual urban interface: the school boundary is not a fence but a transparent façade. In the weekends or for special events, a group of indoor and semi-outdoor courts, a gym, a swimming pool, an exhibition space and a 1,000-seat auditorium can be accessed from the street, transforming the school into a civic centre and the sports field can operate as a district-level stadium with a covered seats capacity for more than 3,000 spectators. Another crucial features of the design is certainly “the loop”. By splitting the high-rise buildings into two horizontal halves interconnected by bridges, the loop drastically reduces vertical movements, allowing students 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, but 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 terms of social inclusion, the design of the public space tries to escape from the centralized, highly hierarchical organization of traditional schools, where students are either lost in the multitude for collective activities or isolated in their classroom, and aims at creating a much more decentralized system that privileges diverse individual experiences in spite of social segregation.
reMIX is a Beijing / Shenzhen / Singapore based studio born from a long experience of academic research and collaborations with renowned international design firms, studying and inquiring diverse scales of interventions and procedural attitudes.
Our work lies at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urban design. We craft processes at diverse scales of intervention from small installations to territorial extensions. Integrating research and practical experiments, we aim at constructing places as multi-scalar ecologies.
In 2021 reMIX won the international competition for the new Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology: 560,000 m2 of educational facilities in the new Guangming Tech City. The new campus is organized around a water system that works at the same time as a flood-control infrastructure and the spine of the public space, providing rich spatial experiences for the students and a healthy habitat for the local fauna. The project is currently under construction.
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