FEI Architects Rescues Peking University's 1988 Teaching Building from Demolition and Remakes It as a School of Mathemat

In 2015, a campus planning proposal at Peking University marked the Educational Technology Building on Wusi Road for demolition. Completed in 1988, it had once been among the most advanced teaching facilities on the Yanyuan campus. It held the largest auditorium on site and hosted many of the university's major events. FEI Architects, led by Michelle Yip, learned of the plan that year and began an eight-year effort that ended in 2023 with the building reopened as the School of Mathematical Sciences. It is now called Zhihua Building and is listed among Beijing's first batch of historic buildings.

The rescue alone is worth noting, but the brief is what makes the project interesting. The facade and the floor area had to stay exactly as they were. Every gain therefore had to come from inside an envelope nobody was allowed to touch. FEI, working with the Beijing Institute of Architectural Science, answered with a principle the university describes as minimal demolition and maximum retention of memory. They then did something less expected: they made mathematics the organizing logic of the interior, from the curves of stair walls to the tiling of the floors.

A Building That Was Supposed to Disappear

The building has three parts. A north wing and a south wing, roughly alike, are joined by a west wing, and together they cover 76 by 72 meters. Most of it stands four storeys high and rises to five in places. From the courtyard it looks almost unchanged: the same pale yellow paint, the same exterior stairs, the same ginkgo trees and the bicycle racks that never left. That is deliberate. The outside reads as a continuation of the old building, not a reinvention.

We think this restraint is the most honest choice available. Buildings from the 1960s to 1990s teaching period rarely get heritage protection in Chinese universities, and this is the only one of its kind left at PKU. Repainting it in its original color asserts that late-socialist institutional architecture is part of the campus record, alongside the more celebrated Yanyuan pavilions.

A Lecture Hall Turned into a Library

The library shows the strongest move in the project. A raked lecture hall with a sloped seating stair has been reworked into a multi-level reading room. Mezzanines step up where the old seating ran, and timber shelving lines the walls. The new floors follow the logic of the former rake, so the geometry of the old room is kept even though its use has changed completely.

The curved white stair walls do most of the spatial work. They sweep between levels and frame views across the stacks, which turns a dense program into something you can read in a single glance. Openings cut through the walls let light and sightlines pass from one level to the next. Without them, a reading room this deep would feel like a warehouse.

Stairs Drawn Like Equations

The overlay of axis lines and coordinates on the library stair is more than a presentation trick. It shows that the spiral balustrade was set out as a defined curve rather than shaped by eye. For a school of mathematics, that is a fitting kind of literalism: the handrail you hold on the way to the stacks can be described by a function.

Outside, the original concrete stair tower zigzags up the wall and was kept as found. Placed side by side, the two stairs sum up the project's approach. The old geometry stays legible, and the new geometry is written beside it, not over it.

Light from Above

Because the facade could not change, daylight and character had to come from the roof. In the meeting room, a grid of square coffers holds yellow and blue tinted panels set at angles. On a sunny afternoon this produces a slowly moving field of color on the terrazzo floor. It is a modest intervention that gives a standard seminar room a clear identity.

The auditorium, the room that once made this building the center of campus life, keeps its steel truss roof and skylights. The red seating and theatrical lighting point back to its role as a venue for ceremonies. Structural reinforcement and upgraded seismic and fire ratings were carried out discreetly. You notice the hall, not the code compliance.

Mathematics Underfoot

The corridors run under a barrel vault with pendant lamps and timber door frames, set above a dark, glossy floor. The real subject here is the floor itself. FEI set five-fold rhombus patterns into the stone, a nod to aperiodic tiling, and placed a board on site explaining how the pattern is built and laid between the column grid. The building teaches you something as you walk through it.

The wit continues into the restrooms, where stall doors carry numbers in different numeral systems above a triangulated teal tile floor. Some will find this a touch cute. We think it works because it stays in service spaces and minor surfaces, never becoming the main idea. The math gives the building a personality without turning it into a theme park.

Plans and Drawings

The before-and-after drawings are the clearest account of the project. The plans trace new circulation routes around the central hall, and the paired sections show how the sloped lecture stair was converted into mezzanines and book stacks. The hand-drawn section sketch of stacked floors, a central void and figures seated on ledges shows the library already worked out as a social space before it was resolved technically.

The detail sheets show how far the geometric discipline goes. A steel node ties new beams into the existing truss above an acoustic ceiling. The corridor vault is drawn as a three-centered arch with every radius marked. The auditorium wall panels follow Fibonacci proportions, and the floor diagrams move from aperiodic tiling to a simple square subdivision between columns.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese campuses have demolished much of their 1980s building stock with little debate, since these buildings are considered too recent to count as heritage and too dated to keep. Zhihua Building makes a strong case against that habit. Funded by a RMB 60 million donation from Lin Gaoyan and built between April 2022 and June 2023 despite pandemic controls, it shows that a fixed envelope and an unchanged floor area are not obstacles. They can be the brief that forces better interior thinking.

The broader lesson concerns the fit between building and discipline. FEI did not apply mathematical imagery as decoration. They used geometry as a working method for curves, vaults, tilings and proportions, then let small amounts of it surface where people would notice. The result keeps the memory of a building many alumni knew, and gives a mathematics faculty a home that reflects how its members think.

School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University (Zhihua Building). Architect: FEI Architects. Location: Yanyuan Campus, Beijing, China. Area: 11,174 m². Year: 2023. Photographs: Fangfang Tian, Jiaozi.

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