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Architects: Atelier GOM
- Area: 12783 ft²
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Shengliang Su, Zhang Jiajing
Text description provided by the architects. De Fu Junior High School is located on De Fu road, Jiading new town, Shanghai. It is a campus which can accommodate 24 junior high school classes. On the north side, it is adjacent to the De Fu primary school, and for the south side, there is normal residential area .There are two buildings on campus respectively: the main teaching building, gymnasium and canteen.
The main teaching building which sits on the west part of the site can hold classrooms, office facilities for teachers, and ancillary facilities. The building has north-south teaching classrooms and east-west special classrooms. It descends towards the sun from three floors to one floor and then generates plentiful roof platform area. Four barrier-free ramps connect the main teaching building with gymnasium and canteen.
Four courtyards.
The space of courtyard has always been the essence of Chinese traditional architecture. When deals with the relationship between architecture and site, the architect subtly designs four courtyards. Inspired by the culture of Chinese characters, these four courtyards present themselves as a Tian-font layout. The dimension of the four courtyard is 25m on each side and each of them has its own form and they connect each other with the ground floor. They are like four seasons, students can feel the time changes, sunrise and sunset in these four courtyards.
Sunken courtyard.
The elevation of the canteen's outdoor terrace is 1.5m below the elevation of the main teaching building outdoor terrace. Here the architect creates a sunken courtyard in which the students can rest on the steps after a meal.
Although restricted by the shape and the size of the site, the architect expects that the building can provide a free walk place for the school teacher and students. The main teaching building has an inside–outside double corridor design. Besides basic vertical transportation, the architect also designs abundant roaming traffic system. The free stretching corridor combines itself intimately with the scattered roof platform, they blur the boundary of the inside and outside, and make walking experience more interesting. The architect hopes that the use can perceive the environment unexpectedly and understand the nature.
The gymnasium provides a semi interior basketball court, it can also be used as an exhibition hall and auditorium. The vertical shading devices adopt the cast-in-place concrete plate with a rectangular cross section. And the roof is a well-shaped beam structure with cast-in-place hanging concrete plate. The section is trapezoidal, and the minimum thickness of each concrete plate is 15 cm.
Each square classroom is designed with a locker room for the students. And the architect also conducts a daylight factor analysis for the square classroom to ensure that the children are able to receive appropriate daylight in the classroom.
The external wall of dry clay is a response to the traditional external wall style of Shanghai and also an attempt to the durability of low cost building materials.
