A School's Living Heart—Back to Neverland

With the pressure of competition for higher education intensifying year by year，students spend 8 to 10 hours per day, 5.5 to 6.5 days per week in school. Therefore, campus green space is the most accessible natural environment for children. It has become the most vital resource for reducing the daily pressure that Chinese students suffered.

The project gradually transforms the roof of the primary school's main teaching building (1300m2) into an outdoor classroom starting with nature education. Considering China's high-density cities, this project provides a low-cost, sustainable approach to redeveloping existing Chinese schools of the compulsory educational stage. In the design strategy, including at least six basic design units, vegetable gardens, teaching galleries, ecological pond, greenhouse, composting, and petting zoo, use these elements as a medium to provide a seasonal space theme to support more than 30 different environment science courses and even gradually bring the traditional indoor subjects such as art, mathematics, and biology to have few lessons outdoor, significantly increasing the length of children's physical contact with nature and promoting children's health and sense of collaboration.

Being limited by the construction and maintenance fund management of Chinese public schools, the project was slowly completed by the design team, school, and professional construction company over 7 years, with a total cost of less than $50K. The design team, social organization, community, and school are all involved in daily outdoor lessons, and most of the minor maintenance or co-design work such as plant management, facilities updating, and art design are capable of carrying out in the daily sessions.

The project is a good example of an appropriate and balanced intervention that provides a high-quality environment for the educational process within a limited roof space.