OPEN Unveils Stunning Design for Suzhou's Shanfeng Academy Building

Beijing-based architectural practice, OPEN Architecture, has recently unveiled the design for the Shanfeng Academy project, located in a new district of Suzhou city. The building is set to be the campus centre for a new K-12 international school and also serves as a cultural hub for the local community. Suzhou is a city that has a deep cultural heritage, known for its poetic gardens and harmony, which the architects have attempted to preserve while creating a major new urban project.

Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, founders of OPEN, believe that finding radical strategies to address the practical challenges of the project, while creating architecture of poetic spirit deeply connected to the local cultural tradition, is at the heart of this project.

As the campus centre serving nearly 2000 students, Shanfeng Academy will provide essential and shared facilities of the school. The building will include a library, an art centre, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a grand theatre of 1000 seats, a black box theatre, and a forum.

Given the intensity of the functional programmes and the high concentration of users, the architects decided to divide one massive building into five individual buildings interconnected by covered walkways. The architects aimed to create voids in the form of four gardens and semi-outdoor spaces by breaking down the mass and pulling them apart. The well-connected walkways easily accommodate a large number of students moving between different activities even during rainy days, which are abundant in Suzhou.

The gardens are designed around the four seasons, and plants are selected accordingly to accentuate the traces of time. Elements of classical Suzhou gardens, such as scholar rocks, traditional pavement patterns, and the use of water, are carefully integrated into the gardens. There is also an unnamed fifth garden on the rooftop of the walkways planted with tall grasses and herbs—a pleasant retreat and social gathering place for students and teachers, it is linked to the main classroom building through a short bridge.

The campus centre replaces a large portion of the fence that encloses the school campus for student safety. While acting as the interface between the school and the city, the campus centre is also able to share its many facilities with the local community when the school is not in session, creating a close bond between the two. A café and a courtyard on the ground floor facing the street offer a pleasant place for parents waiting to pick up their children.

All spaces have natural lighting and natural ventilation to enhance indoor comfort while reducing energy consumption. Board-formed white concrete is adopted for the building envelope, both to pay tribute to the white-wall-grey-roof traditional architecture of the Suzhou area, and to resolve the problem of the traditional white plaster needing constant maintenance to prevent mildew formation and cracking.

OPEN hopes that the campus centre can become a new type of cultural hub combining the city’s rich cultural heritage with the contemporary dimension of this newly urbanized neighbourhood. The building’s sympathetic design, based on Suzhou’s rich cultural history and values, is expected to be an important landmark for the city in the years to come.

Press Release. Courtesy of OPEN