Danish architecture studio CEBRA has completed an adult education centre in the heart of the city of Odense, Denmark. Located next to the central station the HF & VUC Fyn complex marks an important step towards the realisation of a new city campus that ties the inner city and the harbour together. By combining elements from its coarse industrial neighbours with an embracing and transparent interior organisation the HF & VUC Fyn aims at bridging between the scale of the harbour and urban life. The building’s robust and unassuming exterior is contrasted by an inner spatial diversity of rounded forms that create a varied learning environment for 1.300 students – an inspiring and vivid school that continuously suggests new ways of use and makes room for individual learning needs in a collective building.
Achievement Preparatory Academy is a high-performing, college preparatory school located east of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. Founded to close the achievement gap and address the educational needs of the community, Achievement Prep is an award-winning school that has been recognized for having an immediate impact in closing the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students in Washington, DC. Achievement Prep scholars have been among the top performing scholars in the District, often outperforming their peers in more affluent neighborhoods. The new middle school is a building designed to close the achievement gap in the District’s Ward 8 Community.
Singapore University of Technology and Design – Student Housing and Sports Complex.
LOOK Architects, in collaboration with Surbana International Consultants, has put forth the winning design proposal for Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) new student housing and sports facilities, envisioning a spatial framework that embraces creative liberty and possibilities. Drawing a parallel to traditional Chinese painting (empty space being regarded as a spatial element sharing equal if not greater importance as solid figuration), voids are seen as spaces for imagination to thrive. This dimension of ‘energised voids’ in the design approach is manifested as a peek-a-boo trail of collaborative spaces along the common corridors of hostel blocks – an orchestration of multi-use spaces open for leisurely exchanges. On a macro scale, these perforations in the 12-storey hostel blocks are strategically located to allow for increased air movement through the building mass, a passive environmental control measure that promotes natural ventilation through housing units.
Built in 1924, the existing building had revolved around medical-related usage, first serving as a hostel for medical students and subsequently nurses’ quarters after World War II. This legacy is allowed to persist through its transformation into the new medical school.
The European Education Centre for the Housing and Real Estate Industry (EBZ) in Bochum is the sector’s largest education provider in Germany and has been enlarged with the addition of a training and event centre. The design by Gerber Architekten from Dortmund, who were awarded a first prize in a competition, was constructed in just two years. The completed building was inaugurated in the presence of Ina Scharrenbach (Minister of Home Affairs, Municipal Affairs, Construction and Equal Rights) at the Housing and Real Estate summer party on Thursday 19.07.2018.
Construction is complete on the tallest addition to the Phoenix Biomedical Campus—the 10-story Biomedical Sciences Partnership Building (BSPB) designed by Los Angeles-based CO Architects with Ayers Saint Gross of Tempe, AZ. Programmed, designed, and constructed in only 27-months, the 245,000-square-foot, $99-million laboratory complex allows University of Arizona research scientists to collaborate with local healthcare providers and private companies to find new medical cures and treatments.
“We will pursue expanded partnerships with industry that we hope will lead to groundbreaking discoveries,” said University of Arizona President Ann Weaver Hart at the building’s dedication ceremony. “This building will allow us to further these efforts, and, ultimately, improve lives.”
The project design reflects the ‘Montessori’ ideal learning environment, where a learning space should resemble a home more than a typical classroom. Therefore, the learning area is split into multiple small-sized “rooms”, where all the children could feel more like home when they come to school. The layout of these “rooms” has been designed to correlate with each of children’s activities. The best learning environment for children this age is nature, that why the building layout has been carefully planned to support children’s self-learning and integrated both indoors and outdoors spaces, architecture and landscape to provide different learning activities.
The school is located in a residential neighbourhood in the Swiss village of Port. With its characteristic folded roof structure, the school references the pitched roofs of the surrounding houses, the rural history of the region and the smooth hills of the Jura Mountains. Placed on a gentle slope, the building takes advantage of the topography and links various outdoor spaces according to the different access routes of the school children. While the ground floor is used for faculty administration, workshops, a school kitchen and back of the house rooms, the first floor comprises of nine class rooms and three kindergarten units. The upper rooms naturally benefit from the spatial qualities of the folded roof. Each classroom appears to be an independent little house, creating a cozy and homelike atmosphere for the children.
Century-old Hangzhou Normal University builds a new campus five kilometers west of the Xixi Wetland. Here, there is a typical river network in the south of the Yangtze River. One kilometer west of the University is the Warehouse Street of nearly nine hundred years of historical heritage; Water Silk Cotton was once prominent.
A charity school that had been run by a zakah-funded, not-for-profit educational trust for the last six years finally required a building. The site is located on a hill top, in the unplanned settlement within the walls of the majestic Golconda fort in Hyderabad. This school had been functioning out of a large shed with partitions to create classrooms. The project was riddled with multiple challenges. Since the school is run solely based on individual donations, the budget was extremely tight. Material choices had to be economical as well as durable. The ensemble team working on the project was mostly devoting time on a pro bono or non-profit basis. The site is highly contoured and covered with sheet rock and boulders (a topographic trait of the Deccan Plateau) buried under a blanket of garbage piled on over decades. Articulating the peculiar and difficult topography of the site and its surrounds posed a major challenge: due to proximity to heritage structures and dense urban context, most of which is residential, blasting the rock was not an option, and other methods were not affordable. There is also a height restriction in the Heritage Zone.
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