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Architects: Yanfei Architects
- Area: 61749 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Shengliang Su, Yanfei Architects, Hao Chen
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Manufacturers: CIMIC, Fusite, Weichang Aluminum
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Lead Architects: Shui Yanfei
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Structural Consultant: and-structure, Zhang Zhun - And-Structure
The design of the Xianlin School [1] is an exploration of the "general school". Although the system of general education (Общеобразовательная) [2] was introduced by the USSR (The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) as early as after the founding of the People's Republic of China, taking into account the national conditions at that time, the central government decentralized the management of educational undertakings, the primary and secondary schools in the region were invested by the localities. It was not until 1985 that compulsory education was transformed into a state-financed program; the following year, we officially entered the important stage of "nine-year compulsory education." As a result, for quite some time, school construction standards were based on the school architectural code atlases provided by the standard design offices or architectural institutes of individual provinces as a reference.
The "generality" focus fell on economic construction and discussions about the basic physical properties of classroom units, such as lighting, ventilation, noise, and temperature control. Behind it is both a response to the urgent need for large class sizes in times of economic hardship and lack of mechanical and electrical power, as well as a matter-of-fact response to the physical growth and psychological safety needs of students in their teenage years. At the same time, because the overall size of the school is small and moderately scaled, and the buildings are mostly arranged linearly around the playground, the relationship between students' recess activities and the grounds is relatively close. This relationship is documented in a large number of group photographs, forming a collective memory of that period.
Then, with the introduction of the Architectural Design Code for Primary and Secondary Schools in 1986, the basic performance linked to "generality" was incorporated into the code, and the focus of design slowly began to shift to a discussion of form, which is also evident in the series of competitions and anthologies of excellence for schools published at the same time. By 1994, after the introduction of the tax-sharing system, the land-finance model dominated the development of new zones, promoting rapid urbanization and a massive influx of rural population into the cities. The subsequent decline in the number of school-age children in rural areas in the late 1990s led to a policy of local school closures, which became official nationwide in 2001 and, under the principle of optimizing the allocation of educational resources, also led to a disguised expansion of school size, with high-achieving schools and mega-schools beginning to take the stage.
The "general school," on the other hand, is in a rut, and as a basic education package that accompanies the development of a new district, it is part of a mediocre picture that is ultimately an economic calculation in terms of land assembly, teacher/student ratios, class sizes, and overall cost. The specification, as a guarantee of providing basic physical properties, also implies a step-by-step, similar design outcome. Much of the so-called uniqueness is not in the lining but in a kind of picturesque image [3]; the more it tries to resist the picture of mediocrity, the more it exacerbates the status quo. The link between "general" and economy has evolved from a physical construction to an assessable indicator. Gradually, the "general" has slipped into ordinary, widespread, "generic" production.
Therefore, Xianlin School is trying to reexplore the possibility of "general schools". By abstraction, "generality" may imply a specific competency. It focuses on a range of economic-related issues - large-scale teaching methods and resolving large-scale issues, the layout of school buildings and playgrounds, rigid distance control, classroom units, and structural span limitations, public space proportion and mixed zoning, prefabrication rate and pipeline integration, lighting, ventilation, and operating energy consumption, student psychological safety and activity convenience, transportation pressure from commuting to and from school, and community open sharing connections. These numerous issues are hidden in the implication of a standard floor area ratio, hence the code "FAR = 1.0".
The solution, however, does not lie in a change of course but in a re-harmonization of the code and a return to the very formulation of these physical conditions - that is to say, how to renew the basic performance of the "general school" while maintaining massification and large classes. For example, the north-south double corridor brings more stable two-way uniform lighting; most of the time, using natural light can achieve the indoor teaching illumination requirements; the symmetrical arrangement of windows and doors has good natural ventilation but also brings more stable internal layout and better visual relationship between desks and blackboards as well as daily storage; 40m wide inner courtyard above ground (multi-datum[4]) not only provides ample activity space for the students between classes but also effectively reduces the noise interference between the front and back rows of classrooms.
In pleasant weather, the sight and sound of reading in the open classroom are truly delightful. The use of materials and electromechanical equipment is designed to minimize decorative surfaces at the system level while considering their versatility and ease of maintenance. For example, independent vertical pipe wells are used, air-conditioning units are placed on the roof or on the ground, hidden bridges are placed in the interior ceiling, pre-built lights are placed in the laminated floor slabs, and drainage systems are set up in conjunction with the balustrades and corridors.
The axial network of modulus 8.4m x 9.6m responds to the demand for basement with pick-up and drop-off to reduce the traffic pressure brought by the existing schools in the vicinity; on the other hand, it also realizes the universality of primary and secondary teaching units in terms of sight distance, while some of the white space units are also considered for the future expansion of classrooms. Through the fine-tuning of these basic properties, the final result is the multi-dimensional stacked plan of Xianlin School: 3 to 5 floors for the teaching area, 1 to 2 floors for public functions, and -1 floor for the pick-up and drop-off and equipment area.
The two scales of the inner and outer corridors, the former responds to the collective memory of those playgrounds adjacent to the school building of the former general school; the latter is a double-layered void, combined with the internal realization of the local double-span to cope with the seismic requirements of the four elevations to a different extent, while in the part of the terrace with the line of sight of the extracted columns and picket beams is a kind of urban response for the surrounding superblock around the 100-meter residential area. The two scales are intended to maintain their volume but make them transparent.
Xianlin School has now been temporarily put into use as the second-grade section of the elementary school for a year, and the blank units set aside in the original structure have gradually been filled with regular classrooms due to the pressure of the student population. Such a change was unexpected, but it also makes sense. Although the second-grade students seem to be a bit small in this scale, when we record these scenes of use - whether it is chanting in the classroom with the doors and windows wide open during class time, running in the inner courtyard during recess, bustling in the cafeteria during lunch time, enjoying the breeze under the gable porch before physical education class, and all kinds of sports clubs in the playground in the evening, the students in the pick-up hall at the end of school, and the birds and the birds and the birds at the drop-off hall at the end of school, we can see that there is no need for the children in the classroom.
At the end of the school day, in the pick-up and drop-off hall, the birds and beasts scatter; their playfulness gives these spaces another kind of vitality, and also lets us truly feel the capacity and affordance of the building. The exploration of the "general school" that Xianlin School has triggered is not simply a critique of the quotidian life shaped by economics, but perhaps more of an alternative - whether there is still a possibility of extending the Western poiēsis, focusing the familiar of the everyday affairs.
Notes:
[1] Xianlin School: a middle school in the northern part of Xianlin Lake, designed on the basis of the 39-class plus 6 (reserved) middle school plan, and now temporarily used as the second-grade section of Jinling Elementary School (Xianlin Lake Campus), referred to in the text as "Xianlin School".
[2] Общеобразовательная "General education": The principle of universal education adopted by the USSR can be traced as far back as 1903, when the "Program of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party" was announced at the Second Congress of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (SDPP), which proposed "universal free and compulsory education of boys and girls up to the age of 16 years". The principle of universal education can be traced back to the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Program announced at the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia in 1903, which proposed "the introduction of universal free and compulsory education for boys and girls up to the age of 16". Due to the influence of the international situation and the constraints of the economic level, it was not until around 1930 that universal primary education for children began to be fully implemented in the USSR, during which time significant progress was made in the public education sector. It was proposed that education in the new China should be based on "the experience of the new education in the old liberated areas, absorbing the useful experience of the old education and utilizing the experience of the Soviet Union to build a new democratic education. In the early days of New China, the universal education system and education concepts borrowed a lot from the Soviet Union, and at the same time, a lot of Soviet school design theories and design case studies were translated into Chinese, which became an important source of study and research for practitioners in the architectural industry at that time.
[3] Picturesque image: "pittoresque": "Koolhaas: Yes, it is precisely this type of landscape aesthetics to which we refer. For it is the only way to explain the present beauty of China, this horrible juxtaposition of fundamentally incompatible elements." François Chaslin. (2003). Deux conversations avec Rem Koolhaas et caetera. Face à la rupture, p. 134.
[4] multi-datum: "A second aspect of the Domino diagram which can becalled self-referential is the horizontal datum. The notion of a datum in the traditional architectural sense is not modernist but an attitude to the vertical plane which seems to have originated in the 16th century, ”Eisenman, P. (2014). Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign. Log, 30, 139-151.
