Location : Guangzhou, China
Type: Architecture Design, Headquarter buildings
Design Team: Emanuele Faggion with Ruggero Baldasso / Deng SiTong / Yang YiDong / Sun Ceng /Riccardo Bandera / Marco Vendrame
Design Time: 2012
项目地点：广州，中国
项目类型：建筑设计，总部建筑
设计团队： Emanuele Faggion with Ruggero Baldasso / Deng SiTong / Yang YiDong / Sun Ceng /Riccardo Bandera / Marco Vendrame
设计时间：2012
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It might sounds banal: a kindergarten suppose to be designed for its young and small inhabitants. Often, instead, the architectural design won’t focus on this issue….to draw Mickey Mouse or Dumbo on the walls, for us, seems not enough.
This kindergarten commissioned by Poly South China, lies on a very weird shaped site, surrounded by 32 floors residential towers. The most impressive thing is the scale difference, since the kindergarten it have to be only 3 floors high. The site inherits a strange shape, does the kindergarten have to be strange-shaped? We decide to push the building as much as possible close the maximum envelope limit, to create a central courtyard. The use of circles allowed us to “embrace “ all the corners, and, to give a certain graphic coherence; furthermore, this curves makes the outer garden wider.
From our point of view, the choice to put a central courtyard seems a winning choice. In fact, the creation of a barrier between the inner kid-sized playground and the outer big towers helps us to deal with the scale difference, keeps the kids inside a friendly “fence” where is easier to control them and where all the rooms are facing at, giving right amount natural sunlight.
All the classrooms faces directly the south side, so to protect the children from direct sunlight, to provide comfort during the hot Cantonese summer and to reduce the building’s solar gain, the façade is treated as a brick “curtain”. The brickwork with different porosity shades, and guarantees the inner intimacy.
As mentioned above, the classrooms looks into the courtyard where they’re taking the big amount of indirect sunlight through big windows. Loggias besides the classrooms so the children can plays outside also during heavy storms or high temperature days. The aisle, instead, works like a filter for the noises, and runs like a spiral always on the north side of the block. To characterize the courtyard space, the perforated, transparent, metal panels used as fence, are painted red.
Special features are the slide on the staircase, the entertainment room connected with the courtyard and the shaded playground on the roof.
