UTO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

摘要

This is the reconstruction project of a large school of about 800 students. Rather than over-determining the organization of the school, we aspired to design an accommodating and liberating space amongst the trees in a forest to nurture a healthy environment. Louis Kahn famously said that, "School began with a man under the tree, who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realization with a few who did not know they were students." In our project, we thought of this tree as the L-shaped wall. Each classroom would be structured by the placement of these walls, which would be distributed as 'arbitrarily' as possible while achieving the necessary spaces of the school. The seamless appearance of trees and walls makes possible the wide variety of activities of the school. The continuity dissolves the architecture, as if to state that the space was not willfully 'designed.' If there is an educational environment that could host the pedagogical ideas being testes in Japan today- from the concept of the "open education" to the small, "team teaching" classes - we believe this model is capable of responding positively to the anticipated changes.