The school's first textbook
An rendering of the new campus of Futian Middle School.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Chen Chen designed a traffic loop in the air, which strung together many buildings on the campus.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
The clothes hung on the balcony are like the "national flag", blocking out most of the sun and the scenery outside the window.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Campus buildings should not be just "educational containers"
The principal Wang Dejiu felt that there would be no more place to hold more people on the campus.
The Futian Middle School in Shenzhen where he is located is a high school located in the city center.
The student dormitories here are tense. The school vacates the teachers’ dormitory first, and then transforms the laboratories, student activity rooms, multi-function rooms, and art classrooms into student dormitories. Even the small classrooms for the only activities in the literature club are also given to boarding students.
A graduate recalled that after many renovations, the student dormitory was next to the teaching building, and he felt that every day "sleeping is nothing but studying."
When Wang Dejiu took over as the principal, the school had to rent a hotel 300 meters away and transform it into a boys’ dormitory.
In order to ensure the safety of students, school security guards stand on duty on the only way between the school and off-campus hotels to go to and from school every day.
There are too many neighbors in the school.
A 29-story building, a residential area with a house price of over 70,000 yuan per square meter, and a newly built hospital surrounded the school.
It is difficult to free up a piece of land for the school.
Excluding the track and field field, the floor area ratio of the building volume of Futian Middle School reaches 3.87 (the floor area ratio is the ratio of the total construction area to the net land area. Generally, the floor area ratio of primary and secondary schools is less than 1.0-reporter's note), which is almost 3 to 4 times that of traditional middle schools .
Wang Dejiu's troubles are not alone.
In other cities across the country, some first-year students in some schools are assigned to a large shopping mall 200 meters away from the school, and the school’s explanation is that "the school headquarters can't hold so many students."
Other schools do not have the space to design a runway that is long enough.
When running, students can only start from the school gate, and the end point is the school wall.
Sometimes inertia makes students hit the wall.
The principal had to buy soft cushions and stick them on the fence.
According to the Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook, from the establishment of the special zone in 1979 to 2018, the population of Shenzhen increased by 55 times, but the number of primary schools only increased from 226 to 244.
The Shenzhen Municipal Government plans that by 2025, Shenzhen will add 740,000 public compulsory education degrees, 145,000 new kindergarten degrees, and 97,000 public high school degrees — there will be 49 new public general high schools. More than double the current amount.
In order to increase the number of degrees, many primary and secondary schools have to keep pace with the times to "uplift" teaching buildings.
However, it is not compliant to blindly raise the heights. Zhou Hongmei, a fourth-level investigator of the Shenzhen Municipal Planning and Natural Resources Bureau, has seen the initial construction plan for the reconstruction and expansion of a local elementary school: in order to expand the 24 classes to 36 classes, various functional classrooms are added. , The number of teaching floors designed by the designer exceeds the requirements of the "Design Code for Primary and Secondary Schools"-in this code, the primary school building does not exceed the 4th floor.
Because after calculation, the pupils climbed to the 4th floor and reached the extreme fatigue value.
Zhou Hongmei wanted to find a breakthrough for such a school.
Beginning in 2017, she initiated the "New Campus Action" and organized three joint architectural exhibitions in Futian and Longgang Districts in Shenzhen in conjunction with multiple related units-inviting architects to tailor design plans for a number of primary and secondary schools waiting to be renovated and expanded. , The design scheme selected by the jury as the first place, directly won the bid.
Some of the designers participating in the league have become famous internationally, they are the heads of the architecture departments of well-known foreign universities, and some come from young and cutting-edge independent firms.
They have to design plans that meet the needs of the school on a constant area of land, and compete with each other.
With the 3.0 floor area ratio campus, the fire and sunshine problems caused by the campus are waiting for them to be solved one by one.
More importantly, Zhou Hongmei hopes to change the monotonous and boring model campus through architectural design. “A good campus will become the best textbook.” In her opinion, a good campus architecture can influence the thinking and world outlook of a generation. Campus architecture should not be just an "education container", but a material manifestation of educational ideals.
"Students grow up in school every day. Every action of the designer will affect their lives"
The architect Chen Chen was one of the participants in the first joint exhibition.
Before going to Futian Middle School for a survey, she had read the "bidding task book" for the school's renovation and expansion, but when she walked into the student dormitory, she still felt cramped and uncomfortable: the clothes hung on the balcony were like the "national flag", covering most of them. The sunshine and the scenery outside the window, coupled with the southern characteristic weather, make the whole dormitory humid and hot.
A student who enrolled in 2005 recalled that at that time, the school had only one dormitory building, half of the boys and girls, entering the dormitory from different entrances, the canteen downstairs was simple and small, and students who ran slowly when they arrived at the meal. Lined up for nearly 20 minutes to get dinner.
For high school students who cherish their time, 20 minutes make them wait anxiously.
Liu Zhenzhen, director of the Media Center of Futian Middle School, recalled that in 2016, she was the class teacher. In the office next to the military training of freshmen, she used a network map to check the route and distance of students from home to school one by one. Check in.
Because there are not enough student dormitories, students with the same scores in the senior high school entrance examination are reluctant to choose Futian Middle School, preferring to choose schools with boarding conditions.
In addition to the student dormitory, Wang Dejiu also needs to consider the following issues: the plan to expand the number of students from 2,600 to 3,000; and the identified dilapidated buildings on the campus are waiting to be demolished.
He had a bold idea, could he demolish the original campus and rebuild it?
Building a campus is not an easy task.
Land is only one of the constraints, and there are also constraints imposed by building codes.
The "Design Code for Primary and Secondary Schools" not only requires that middle school teaching buildings should not have more than 5 floors, but also requires that ordinary classrooms should not be less than two hours in full windows during the winter solstice. Track and field fields and various ball venues should be arranged in a north-south direction.
Chen Chen knows how many problems we need to face when designing a school: the construction drawings should be specific to every detail, such as handrails, windows, furniture, lamps; we should also have a bird’s eye view of the campus, and rationally plan the teaching area, living area, and living area in the limited space. Library, gymnasium, huge playground-a school is a large collection of N different types of public buildings.
But she is still fascinated by campus architecture, "Students grow up in school every day. Every action of the designer will affect their lives, and it must be worthy of the students for so many years."
"Education has undergone earth-shaking changes, but our classrooms are still matchboxes"
Working in the middle school for more than 20 years, Wang Dejiu is used to the scene of maintenance and renovation every winter and summer vacation.
The old campus always suffers from congenital deficiencies. Whenever a place is old or broken, it will "treat the head and feet" and "no winter or summer vacation is peaceful."
He told reporters that according to the previous process, if you want to build a building on campus, the school is only responsible for submitting the "Tendering Tasks" and will no longer participate in the subsequent project approval, bidding, design and other processes. After the house is built, the " "Key" to the principal.
The “turnkey project” model made the newly-built campus buildings unable to meet the teaching needs, and the school had to renovate it twice.
"It's like on a moving train. We know there is a problem, but we can't get off the train." Wang Dejiu said.
Zhou Hongmei also found that many school designs that conform to the "Code for Design of Primary and Secondary Schools" and urban planning, even if the design is mediocre and homogeneous, the Planning Bureau will pass the approval.
For this joint exhibition, she decided to encourage school principals, teachers and students to participate in the design of the new campus, and invited the principal to observe the selection process.
Before the reconstruction of Futian Middle School, Zhou Hongmei suggested that Wang Dejiu should do a good job of preliminary planning and research. The most important thing is to think clearly, what will Futian Middle School look like in the future?
Wang Dejiu's answer is to build a different school in the central area.
"Education has undergone earth-shaking changes, but our classrooms are still matchboxes."
Wang Dejiu convened a faculty meeting and almost used the “fighting” method to call on teachers to participate in the design of the new campus, “without setting limits”, and let the teachers boldly put forward their educational needs.
As the discussion deepened, the teacher's ideas exploded.
The physical education teacher said that the school’s physical education should not only be provided by the physical education teacher. If students want to learn taekwondo, they can set up a taekwondo club by themselves and call on other students to join.
The Chinese teacher hopes to build an independent Chinese reading room to provide pure literary works, and to prepare a "book bar" for the bookworms to exchange their reading experience.
Many years ago, the classrooms of Futian Middle School's Literature Club were transformed into dormitories. Chinese teachers could only organize activities once a year in the open space between the teaching buildings.
Liu Zhenzhen ordered 8 functional classrooms in one go.
She organized students to make micro-films, which required studios, directors, performances, simulation studios, recordings, and projection halls, but at the time, these activities were all packed in a functional classroom that was only half the size of an ordinary classroom.
Media subjects and micro-film festivals are already the characteristics of Futian Middle School. Liu Zhenzhen also wants to "make it stronger and bigger" so that the media course of Futian Middle School will become a benchmark course in Shenzhen.
Wang Dejiu recorded all the requirements put forward by teachers of various subjects in the "Tendering Tasks". According to the last statistics, the planned construction area was nearly 130,000 square meters.
At that time, the teaching building area of Futian Middle School was only over 30,000 square meters.
Good design can help schools solve problems
The contradiction of less land and more people is not the first time that schools today have encountered it.
Excellent campus design can accommodate all teaching needs as much as possible.
Professor-level senior architect Huang Hui has designed 13 primary and secondary schools in Beijing and is also one of the drafters of the "Design Code for Primary and Secondary Schools".
The 83-year-old was once in charge of designing the reconstruction and expansion plan of Beijing No. 4 Middle School.
It was 1981. She remembered that one of the problems the school faced was that when the blackboard reflected light, the students sitting in the corner couldn't see the blackboard clearly; the teacher's voice was so low that the students in the back seat couldn't hear it.
In order to ensure fairness, the teacher had to change seats every two weeks, and the students took turns "invisible and inaudible."
For this reason, every Sunday, Huang Hui conducts optical and acoustic experiments in the architectural physics laboratory of Tsinghua University, studying how to design classrooms so that every seat in the classroom can be like a theater seat with the best view. .
She slowly adjusted the angle of her vision, designed the classroom into a pentagonal shape, and twisted both sides of the blackboard slightly by 5 degrees. In this way, the students in the corner and the blackboard were 30 degrees, just enough to see the chalk characters clearly, the students in the back seat The distance to the teacher is closer.
The construction unit is in trouble-the building materials needed for the pentagonal classroom are too thick and expensive.
Huang Hui adjusted it again and again, and finally designed a hexagonal classroom, which looks like a blooming flower after being assembled.
At that time, the physical education teacher of Beijing No. 4 Middle School wanted to design a swimming pool, but the land near the school was tight. When Huang Hui applied for the expansion of land to the higher authorities, the other party was very embarrassed.
How to add a swimming pool to the original area?
Huang Hui thinks that he can dig up to 80 cm of the ground and design an indoor underground swimming pool. In this way, the water temperature can be stabilized and the school management costs can be saved later.
And a primary school near Deshengmen that she participated in the design, due to the low terrain, the water in the alley often poured into the classroom, students had to bring a piece of cloth with them, take off their shoes before entering the school, wade into the classroom barefoot, and sit down. Then dry your feet, step on the beam on the side of the desk, and go to class.
After school, they waded to leave school, wiped their feet with a cloth, and put on their shoes.
Huang Hui wanted to help the group of elementary school students taking a water class.
She designed a four-story teaching building. The second floor of the teaching building was flush with the street, like a dam, and then a small gentle slope was designed at the school gate to block the water outside the school.
Good design can help schools solve problems, Huang Hui said.
At the Shenzhen Architecture Exhibition, Zhou Hongmei was looking for such a design.
In order to ensure the professionalism of the architectural joint exhibition, Zhou Hongmei formed a luxurious expert group, among which Zhu Jingxiang, a professor at the School of Architecture of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was one of them.
In Zhu Jingxiang's view, a good campus design allows others to discover the true value of a school: it not only makes students feel fun and interesting, but teachers find it helpful to teaching, but also inspires academia and even the next generation to think.
Good designers can transcend the understanding of the existing norms, and then design plans based on the characteristics of the school scale, the characteristics of teachers and students, the city where they are located, and the neighborhood environment.
In the architectural joint exhibition, the architect who designed the scheme for the People's Primary School in Futian District, Shenzhen, deliberately reserved the "small forest" near the school.
More than 20 years ago, the original site of this elementary school used to be an industrial plant. Later, after the factory was moved away, a banyan tree with a height of ten to twenty meters grew on the idle land.
The designer designed a building enclosed on three sides, wrapped in a small forest, and the runway is under the green shade. When the students are running, there are big trees to shade them, so they don't need to be exposed to the sun.
Among all the renovated and expanded primary and secondary schools, Futian Middle School has the most difficult challenge and is known as the "King of High Density".
Among the 57 institutions that signed up for Futian Middle School, Chen Chen's team was not shortlisted at first, and when a team withdrew, she was formally selected as a "substitute member".
Competitors with her include the team of Zhang Yonghe, the dean of MIT's Department of Architecture.
In the "six to three" trials, Chen Chen's self-introduction was a little trembling in front of a group of highly qualified judges.
With only 15 minutes of display time, she needs to fully demonstrate the results of many days of thinking.
She insisted on putting the playground on the west side and the teaching building on the east side because the west side is adjacent to Shenzhen Central Park.
The design of high east and low west allows students to stand on the roof of the teaching building, from far to near, to see the skyline of Futian District, the huge logo of COCO Park, the woods and lakes of Shenzhen Central Park, and occasionally stop on the playground. Chi Heron.
She also turned the playground 20 degrees counterclockwise, raised it by 10 meters, and stuffed it into six basketball courts, a swimming pool, and a 1,000-person lecture hall under the playground.
At the junction of the playground and the school gate, she designed the entrance plaza, with student entrance on one side and social entrance on the other.
In winter and summer vacations or weekends, residents can enjoy the on-campus playground through the social entrance, which is the only standard track and field field within 2 kilometers of the surrounding area.
Sitting in the audience, Wang Dejiu immediately imagined that Chen Chen's design also took care of the parents who pick up and drop off the children. With the spacious entrance plaza, there will no longer be problems with parents in traffic jams at the school gate.
She also imitated the winding roads in Suzhou gardens and designed a traffic loop in the sky, which strung together many buildings on the campus.
This air corridor cuts off the 10-story teaching building and turns it into two 5-story buildings, saving students the time to climb the building.
On this traffic circle, she designed many corners and put in various furniture for students to play, watch movies, display works, etc. It is an "informal space" where students can play freely in addition to studying.
"If I hadn't experienced middle school in 6 years, I might not feel so empathetic." Chen Chen recalled that 22 years ago, when she was in high school in Tianjin, she desperately yearned for an "informal space" for fun.
Once, she chose the evacuation stairs next to the bicycle shed-there was no teacher passing by, and away from the classroom. She was jumping into the mud pit with her companions. The road was slippery on rainy days. She accidentally fell, knocking her head on the corner of the stairs and bleeding.
When many people describe their alma mater, they rarely mention terms such as privacy and quiet.
For Chen Chen, his alma mater is unobstructed and serious, and it is convenient for teachers to manage students. If students want to have fun, they have to be sneaky and fight the teachers.
When she first went to Futian Middle School for prospecting, the students were forming a circle, manipulating robots in the open space in front of the teaching building, and cheerleaders were cheering on the side.
Admissions information for the youth science and technology summer camp of a technology company is posted on the corridor.
"The student's life has changed, and the container has not changed." She found the similarities between her alma mater and Futian Middle School.
"Do a small gamble"
Letting students fall in love with school is one of the goals of the Shenzhen "New Campus" architectural joint exhibition.
Cui Kai, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, participated in the final review of the joint exhibition.
He concluded that Shenzhen’s attempt was to mobilize the best design forces to design high-quality primary and secondary school buildings under the background of scarcity of land, which inspires the construction of primary and secondary schools across the country, especially the practice of temporary school buildings.
The temporary school building is the method proposed by Zhou Hongmei: on the idle reserve land in Futian District, use light building materials to build temporary school buildings that can be disassembled, moved, and assembled. 96% of the building materials are recyclable. When the school starts construction, the teachers and students will move to In the transition school building.
Zhou Hongmei gave the temporary school a poetic name, "Noah's Ark".
In the past, when the campus was renovated, most of the cross-movements were used. The original campus was divided into two halves, half for construction and half for teaching.
Zhou Hongmei worries that the construction dust and noise caused by cross-moving will affect students' classes.
In Cui Kai's vision, in the future, this kind of transitional temporary buildings can help solve the problem of the expansion of 10 nearby schools, and they can be assembled and used repeatedly.
"Architecture always pays attention to those buildings that never end, but this kind of fast and flexible lightweight buildings is worth pushing and trying under the rhythm of urbanization." Zhou Hongmei said that at present, Shenzhen has many school teachers. Students attend classes in temporary school buildings.
A more practical consideration is that the demand for degrees in a city is dynamic. When the demand for degrees in Longgang District is met, the temporary school building can be moved to Futian District and assembled again. "Imagine it is like a building guerrilla. You can go wherever you need it. Ah, how cool!" Zhou Hongmei said with a smile.
Chen Chen and the teachers of various subjects in Futian Middle School set up a WeChat group to discuss, and they wanted to build a Grand Canyon Museum to bring knowledge into a limited space.
The geography teacher puts forward a wild idea. Can the sinking space of the teaching building be used to imitate the impact of temperature zones on the ecosystem, and plants of different temperature zones can be planted in the sinking space?
Chen Chen is worried that plants of different latitudes cannot survive in Shenzhen. If they are replaced with plastic plants, it will affect the campus landscape.
"Can we switch to longitude?" She proposed a compromise plan, planting subtropical plants with different longitudes in the three-story space. From the bottom up, you can see the subtropical landscapes of Asia, Africa, and South America.
Some teachers worry that changing latitude to longitude will cause confusion among students.
Wang Dejiu immediately supported Chen Chen's idea, "We must have sufficient confidence in the ability of high school students to understand the facts."
On December 17, 2020, Futian Middle School moved to a temporary school building, and construction of the original campus began.
Zhu Jingxiang recalled that when selecting Futian Middle School, the judges had entangled in Chen Chen and another senior firm. The discussion was intense. In the end, the judges unanimously decided to hand over the "king of high density" to the young team.
In the past, the units that participated in the bidding of public buildings often had Grade A qualifications in the engineering design and construction industry.
Chen Chen's independent firm has no relevant qualifications, and it has been difficult to truly participate in the design of public buildings.
At that time, Chen Chen's team actually built less than 2,000 square meters of buildings. She laughed at herself, "It may be less than the combined area of all the toilets on the new campus of Futian Middle School."
"Giving her a chance is a long-term investment in the future (construction industry)." Zhu Jingxiang explained, "We are willing to do such a small gamble."
China Youth Daily · China Youth Daily reporter Wei Xi Source: China Youth Daily