Hangzhou International School

Hangzhou International School envisions the future educational space of a community where knowledge, information, and vitality are intertwined, and sharing, diversity, and complexity are embraced. Education Hub is proposed to create a new teaching scenario characterized by intensive land use and high-efficiency space, with shared and communicative space as the main feature, as well as realizing the rearrangement of teaching resources and reshaping the educational environment. The central radiation configuration layout, which is built on sharing, equality, efficiency, and experience, organizes and defines the whole campus. Functionally, it is a complex of all the public spaces with the pool, gyms, theatres, library, and cafeteria. The Hub space programs a 25m*6 lane natatorium (1F), an elementary school gymnasium (2-3F), a middle school gymnasium (4-5F) in the east, and a restaurant (1F), a Black box theater (2-3F), and a grand theater (3-5F) in the west, which is connected with the staircase, as well as a social platform. On the other hand, the comprehensive form strategy organizes the campus circulation in the most compact way possible to meet the all-weather and all-climate teaching space usage requirements while maximizing outdoor spaces. Spatially, the Education Hub is an open space that welcomes children of all ages to explore freely, as well as fostering an informative learning mode of explorative, random, and full of communication chances. Through the ambiguity and multiple interpretations of spatial use, an open educational concept is achieved through spatial experience. Here, students grow through interactions, cooperation, and competition with their peers, gaining confidence on the "stage" where they are the main characters. The atrium stairs serve as the spatial guide and organizer of the Hub and are linked to the grand staircase in the lobby and the corridors inside the teaching clusters to create a continuous social platform that provides abundant opportunities for interaction among teachers and students with different cultural backgrounds. The corridor creates multiple space nodes for activities and spontaneous discussions, which stimulates chance encounters and informal interactions, where the mixture of formal and informal teaching functions catalyzes a diversity of teaching behaviors. Education Hub is not only a vision of future teaching scenarios but also a prototype of educational space applicable to widely intensive land use - releasing the maximum open activity space with limited land use and creating a more efficient and shared new campus experience. Otherwise, the centered radian configuration adopted by Education Hub replaces the traditional visual or authoritative center with the activity space of non-traditional teaching as the center, which creates a decentralized and more equal relationship between teachers and students on campus.