The competition brief for Lianhua Primary School asked to quadruple the size of the existing school, which stands in the middle of Lianhua Sancui neighborhood, surrounded by dense housing slabs. The challenge of expanding the current 9,300 sqm to 35,400 sqm in a site that is less than 10,000 sqm was made even more difficult by the requirement of a 150m running track.

As a starting point we tested different spatial configurations for the running track: A) on the ground, beside the school building; B) on top of a podium, with part of the public program underneath; C) embedded in the volume of the school; D) on the roof. The latter solution gave us better results in terms of balancing the spatial quality of the outdoor spaces with the requirements of fire regulations and obtaining a more efficient internal circulation.

▼场地环境: 挑战与机遇，Urban context: opportunities and challenges ©reMIXstudio

Moving away from the conventional two-dimensional zoning strategy of Chinese schools, we explored the concept of “the overlapped campus”, vertically layering all the different functional zones in a richer and more complex layout that better responds to the extreme density of the site. In this way, no classroom in the school is farther than 2 floors from a large outdoor sports area and during the 10min break between classes students have access to a variety of outdoor spaces that would not fit in conventional school floor plans.