School of Thought: A School Plan That Lets Students Choose Where Learning Happens

Most schools are built around one assumption: learning happens in a classroom, and everything else is circulation or break time. School of Thought rejects that hierarchy. Here the corridor, the courtyard, the stair and the window seat carry as much educational weight as the lab bench. The building does not just house learning. It works as an active participant that shapes how students feel, gather and focus.

Designed by Elly Yang and Sijing Liu, the project was shortlisted in School Of Thought 2020. The brief asked entrants to rethink educational space. Yang and Liu answer with a fluid, experience-driven environment. Classrooms, laboratories, a library, workshops, a gym, a lecture theatre and a cafe are woven together through atriums, courtyards and informal study corners. They are not stacked along a double-loaded corridor.

Stone, Timber and Daylight Along the Courtyard Edge

The courtyard passage sets the project's tone. A stone-clad wall runs alongside a stair with a slatted balustrade, and students move through full daylight toward an open lawn. The slats are the key move. They let light and sightlines pass through the stair, so a vertical connection becomes a semi-transparent screen rather than a solid barrier. You sense the levels above and the green beyond before you reach either.

The palette of concrete, stone and timber stays deliberately restrained. The designers describe it as neutral yet warm, and the image bears that out. The heavy stone anchors the edge, and the timber softens the threshold at the scale of the hand. Semi-open courtyards like this one pull daylight deep into the plan, so the light shifts through the school day. That constant change gives the building a quiet, ambient liveliness.

Social Rooms That Double as Stages

The dining hall and the atrium show how far the scheme pushes shared space beyond its usual job. In the dining hall, vaulted timber ceiling panels sit above round tables, and a small tiered stage occupies one end, where a student plays guitar. The stage turns lunch into an informal venue. A room built for eating also hosts performance and spontaneous gathering.

The atrium goes further. A wide timber stepped seating area rises beneath a skylight, and students cross the pale floor or settle onto the steps. The steps work as seating, circulation and an amphitheatre all at once. This is the open plan doing real work: the atrium links levels visually and gives students a place to watch, wait or talk. As the designers put it, learning becomes a collective experience rather than an individual task.

Window Seats as a Choice, Not an Afterthought

Against all that openness, the study room offers retreat. Vertical timber fins line the wall, and two deep window seats frame nothing but sky. Students read on the floor and in the alcoves, scattered rather than seated in rows. The fins add rhythm and a degree of acoustic and visual softness. The window seats are sized for one body to curl into, so they set a scale of privacy inside a larger shared room.

This room makes the project's case for self-directed learning. A student-centred school is only credible if students can pick their environment. Some will want the buzz of the atrium steps, and others need a quiet corner with daylight. By giving both equal design attention, Yang and Liu treat emotional well-being as a spatial problem with spatial answers.

Specialist Spaces Kept Bright and Legible

Specialist programmes are often where school design slips back into windowless efficiency. Here they keep the scheme's clarity. The dance studio has a sprung wood floor, ballet barres and mirrors, with dancers caught mid-leap under rows of track lights. The science laboratory pairs long white benches with orange stools and shelving, and a student in a lab coat holds a flask beside a sunlit window. Both rooms are set up for focused, technical work, yet neither feels sealed off.

The orange furniture in the lab is a small decision, but it shows how deliberately the designers use colour to shape mood. Together these rooms show the programmatic layering behind the whole project. Academic, creative and physical activities sit within one system, so students can move between rigour and play without crossing into a different architectural world.

Why This Project Matters

School of Thought is persuasive because it does not depend on spectacle. Its tools are ordinary and well tested: daylight, timber, stepped seating, window seats and visual connection between levels. What sets it apart is the conviction that each of these shapes a student's emotional state as much as any curriculum. The open plan here is a social argument. It gives students many ways to be in a building, not just an aesthetic preference for fewer walls.

The project also reaches past the school gate. It frames courtyards, the atrium and the library study corner as semi-public interfaces with the wider community. The school then becomes a civic participant rather than a closed institution. For a typology that has barely changed in a century, that is a valuable provocation. It suggests that the best learning environments may be those that blur where learning stops and living begins.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Elly Yang, Sijing Liu

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Project credits: School of Thought by Elly Yang, Sijing Liu School Of Thought 2020 (uni.xyz).