Z&Z STUDIO Steps a Shenzhen High School Down a Hillside and Lifts Its Running Track into the Air

Dense Chinese cities have produced a familiar type of school: a slab or two of classrooms, a perimeter fence, and a running track that takes up most of the ground. The Nanshan Affiliated School of Beijing Normal University, completed in 2025 by Z&Z STUDIO under Zhong Zhong, rejects that formula on a 46,447 m² campus in Shenzhen. The architects call it a "terraced courtyard campus." The building follows a gentle slope, steps its massing down in planted decks, and frames views toward an adjacent park, the hills behind, and the harbour beyond.

The most interesting move is the decision about the track. It does not sit on the ground. It rises to the second-floor level on slender columns, and the gymnasium, basketball courts and canteen sit in the shade beneath it. The studio describes the scheme as a cross-frame layout with terraced massing, and the plans support the claim. This is a school planned in section, where the ground plane gets used two or three times. For a city that is short on flat land and long on heat, that is the right instinct, and we think it deserves close attention.

A Hillside Read as a Staircase

From above, the campus reads less like a building than like a piece of terraced landscape. Green roofs drop in steps toward the lower edge of the site. White parapets trace each level, and square courtyard voids are cut through the mass like light wells in a monastery. Behind it, the forested slope continues the gradient the building starts, and the high-rises beyond make clear how unusual this much open roof is in Nanshan.

The stepping does real work. Each terrace gives the floor above it an outdoor room, so the building does not present one sheer wall to the park. It also means the school never looms over its surroundings. The tallest teaching volume sits on the western edge, and the massing falls away from there, so most classrooms get a share of the view instead of a few corner rooms taking all of it.

Putting the Track on the Second Floor

The raised field is the boldest piece of the project, and the dusk photographs show why. Ringed by a white railing, the oval track floats at the level of the classroom terraces, with the hill rising directly behind it. The top-down aerial makes the relationship clear: the track and the planted courtyards are neighbours on the same datum, not ground and building.

That alignment matters for daily life. Students can step from a teaching floor onto the sports field without going downstairs and crossing a service yard. The columns holding up the field are thin enough that it reads as a lifted plane, not a stadium podium. The risk with this strategy is a dark, residual ground floor, which is why what happens underneath becomes the real test.

The Shaded Ground Floor

Z&Z STUDIO passes that test. Under a coffered concrete ceiling on round columns, basketball and badminton courts open to the air on several sides. Low sun slants in across a red floor while students play in the shade. In Shenzhen's climate, a covered court that lets the breeze through is arguably more useful than an exposed one for much of the year, and the space feels generous instead of left over.

At the street corner, the curved white edge of the podium sits on slender columns above timber-slatted walls. It is a calm, civic face for a school: open at the base, with a clear horizontal line overhead, and none of the gated defensiveness that often marks campus edges in the city.

Courtyards as the Unit of Organisation

Inside, the campus organises itself around four courtyards. One holds white open stairs and circular planted lawns that students cross on the way between wings. Another is quieter and more ceremonial, with a bronze sculpture between two round columns, inscribed boulders and trees beneath stacked grey balconies.

These spaces do what corridors usually fail to do: they give circulation a destination. The open stairs turn movement between floors into something visible and social, and the balconies above work as galleries over the courtyard floor. The courtyard is an old typology in Chinese building, and here it is stacked and opened to the sky instead of laid flat on one level.

Running Past the Classrooms

Two images capture the relationship between sport and study better than any diagram. In one, students cross the red track and grass pitch in front of the white school block and its orange bays. In the other, runners blur past the stepped facade at dusk. The classrooms are always close to the field, and the field is never hidden from the classrooms.

The orange cladding adds a dose of warmth and rhythm to an otherwise white composition. It marks the bays without competing with the planted terraces, and it gives the long elevations a scale that teenagers can read.

Mountain, Park, Harbour

The brief's three-part landscape ambition becomes literal after dark. The lit rooftop gardens, stairs and track sit next to the harbour, with container cranes glowing on the horizon, while a slender tower rises behind the terraced block. Few schools are designed so explicitly around what students will see from the roof.

We read this as the project's underlying argument: a school's outdoor space should be a vantage point, not just a yard. By lifting the terraces and the track, the architects turn the whole roofscape into an observation deck over the mountain, park and sea.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the oval track beside stepped blocks wrapped around four courtyards. On the ground floor, basketball courts, a gymnasium and a canteen fill the area beneath the field, with a separate dormitory block at the upper right. The first floor adds a library and an auditorium, and classrooms cluster around the courtyards next to a large void that opens over the courts.

The second floor is where the plan locks together: the 300m track and sports field sit directly beside classroom blocks arranged around planted courtyards. On the third and fourth floors, classroom wings, offices and a column of teaching rooms on the east side frame the open voids, and generous viewing platforms open eastward.

By the fifth floor, a long teaching bar holds the western edge while rooftop platforms surround the voids. The sections confirm the logic. One cuts through a low classroom block over a basement and a taller dormitory tower beside the road. The other runs from the gymnasium through the track edge and the stepped classroom block to the sloped park, showing how closely the building traces the ground.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese school construction tends to repeat itself, and land scarcity usually yields taller slabs and smaller yards. The Nanshan Affiliated School shows another route. By stacking program in section, lifting the track, and shading the courts beneath it, Z&Z STUDIO gives back more usable outdoor space than the site seems able to hold, and it organises that space around courtyards and terraces instead of corridors.

The broader lesson is that a sloped urban site with strong views is an opportunity to exploit, not a constraint to flatten. Designers working on schools in other dense, warm cities should take note: treat the roof as ground, treat the ground as shade, and let students learn with the landscape in view.

The Nanshan Affiliated School of Beijing Normal University by Z&Z STUDIO (led by Zhong Zhong), Shenzhen, China. Area: 46,447 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by Tianpei Zeng.

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