Stacked and terraced: A sports and culture sandwich

With their project for the aforementioned Hongling High School, O-office Architects utilised the sports and cultural components of the programme brief to develop a spatial concept that optimised the specific site and topographical situation. Standardised building modules are composed of a sports court and classrooms. These modules are grouped in two slightly offset rows along the length of the site, above a swimming pool which is dug into the ground at the lowest level. The result is a differentiated architectural landscape that, despite its high density over three levels, nonetheless maintains a human scale. 

The outdoor sports courts on the top floor alternate with a cluster of studios and art rooms, which functionally enrich the complex and naturally enhance the spatial qualities. The shielding of the sports areas by the studios and art rooms in which singing, music and art are taught enables independent operation on the sports fields. The steel framework system also allows for future adaptations and room connections that will arise in the dynamic development of the education sector.

To circulate users through this tight urban site, the dense building volume is divided by three elongated corridors containing staircases and ancillary rooms connecting the two rows of recurring modules on different levels – as well as the canteen and student accommodation outside the new cluster – and closing the building off on both of its long sides. The two outer access corridors – one fronting the sports field and the street – are sculpturally designed with gabion walls that connect to neighbouring functions on two levels. This turns the new sports cluster into a distribution platform that reorganises pedestrian traffic on the campus.

The ground floor did not need to be thermally enclosed in this subtropical climate. Instead, (in addition to the swimming pool), two parallel sequences of rooms containing different courts and spaces – for table tennis, basketball, badminton and gymnastics – are openly accessible. Short staircases connect these individual spaces to upper levels to form independently functional areas that can be partitioned off from each other if required.

For pupils and teachers alike, the new sports and art building, with its terraced design and complex access to the neighbouring functions, provides a complex spatial experiential that is simultaneously an immersive educational component that trains school users in their everyday spatial perception far beyond the prescribed curriculum. The porosity of the space, with its various connections to neighbouring buildings, is just one of the characteristics of this school complex that demonstrates in an exemplary manner how architecture in the educational sector can have a stimulating effect on users.