Factory to School

Apr 2019

This research-oriented project is inspired by the emergence of alternative education in China. The clients are private schools with operating teaching methods, including that of Waldorf, Montessori, STEM education, etc. The site is a former factory offered by the evacuation of heavy industries in Beijing.

The focus of the project is to create learning landscapes that utilize industrial heritage and facilitate the teaching of alternative education schools. Group interviews of teachers and students are conducted. Several case studies including the current campuses of the clients are put together to decode the typography of learning landscapes.

Just a few more words, a learning landscape, according to Herman Hertzberger in Space and Learning, is the ‘flexibility’ offered by the architect. It’s a structure ready to absorb and adapt to the changes the unorthodox education makes use of, open and unarticulated, rich in transitional areas, as a supplementary to the classroom-type spaces. Here I would like to refer to its broader meaning, the landscape as the very first daily stimuli for learning, without manual arrangement by the teachers. Here inside the giant former factories, what can be the best learning landscape?

While the proposed site, three separate factory plants seems unfit for primary/middle school campuses at first glance, the typology turned out the opposite when we visited our clients. Short on budget, alternative education sites are somewhat “brutalist”. Yet they offer creative potentials when pupils are instructed to help themselves as part of their education.

The organization of indoor spaces with particular functions has made the designing of educational architecture a tricky one. Alternative education leaves more freedom to the pupils and requires less “managing”. With pupils running all over the place, the connections become the vigor hub. Corridors, atriums, thresholds, etc. are all to integrate into the space models of factories.

The concept “crossroad” is adopted to create the vigor hub and offer a flamboyant learning landscape. Factory mega-volumes and mega-structures collide with the learning vibe and make perfect raw material for nurturing teen engineers and so on.

BArch 3rd Year Studio / Tsinghua University

Instructed by Feng Zang, Zhe He (People’s Architecture Office)