HKUST Nansha Campus
Project Location：West of Fok Ying Tung Middle School, Nansha, Guangzhou
Building Area：47000 sqm
Design Period：May 2006 Status: Competition Category: Cultural and Educational
“Campus inside Campus” is our concept, the Nansha school will be granted a rural ambience between water and suitable for a unique academic research lifestyle.
“Campus inside Campus”
The new facility will be HKUST's first off-shore campus in Mainland China. Being an entity as much as being part of the IT Park, the new facility will form a “Campus inside Campus”. Our proposal is built upon the idea of combining the traditional Chinese landscape, found throughout the existing IT Park with contemporary architecture expression. In contrast of the large one-building complex and urban setting of the Hong Kong Campus, the Nansha school will be granted a rural ambience between water and suitable for a unique academic research lifestyle.
Open Campus
In the master plan, the design layout centralizes the botanical garden, greenery, plaza, water features and natural forest walk ways. The 'open campus' is a direct result of the campus inside the campus idea and the garden brought together. While the open campus is composed of an architecture strategy of loose buildings in a garden setting, the result is borderless internal and external spaces establishing a variety of campus experiences that the contemporary international based researcher requires. This variety of choice and notion of openness will not only be symbolic in the context of the HKUST graduate campus it is a statement that the school is inviting talent to nurture themselves for the new world.
Ideology of Education
Attention to the spatial organizations encourages participation, exchange and sharing among the community composed of various campus groups: students, faculties, researchers or occasional visitors. Education in the 21st century is not about being told what knowledge is but through the discovery of it, in all places. It is less about being closed off in rooms and more about seeking knowledge exchange through communication channeling. We believe the design of a building can help facilitate a new spatiality of knowledge. Spaces that are overlapping but separate, open but closed intimate but active all to found in one building complex , the new HKUST campus building in Nansha.
