yokohama: the second oldest worldwide college on the planet
Kengo Kuma & Associates is designing a “wood home” for its new campus at Yokohama Worldwide Faculty in Japan, the second oldest worldwide college on the planet. When the varsity was based in 1924, the varsity had solely six college students between the ages of six and twelve, had a single instructor, and taught in a rented room at a YMCA within the metropolis.
Since then, its founding members have pledged that the varsity will present each schooling and counseling to worldwide college students, and now enrolls college students from greater than 54 nationalities and has greater than 100 lecturers from greater than fifteen nationalities.
photographs © ︎ Kawasumi-Kobayashi Kenji Photograph Workplace
creating on a human scale by way of a foldable facade
Architects at Kengo Kuma & Associates instantly outline the brand new Yokohama Worldwide Faculty constructing with its wood panel facade. This vary of tilting surfaces – built-in with planters – is used to divide the large quantity of the venture to create a tender, wood home on a human scale. On the roof, a Japanese-style room and a backyard look down on the harbor beneath, an area that the group saysembodies the varsity’s respect for range and Japanese tradition. ‘
on Kengo Kuma’s new campus
Describing the design of its new Yokohama Worldwide Faculty constructing, the Kengo Kuma & Associates group explains:By connecting school rooms and sports activities amenities with open hubs, we created a fluid dwelling room-like atmosphere between school rooms, avoiding closed corridors as a lot as potential.
‘Within the middle of the amenities, an atrium filled with pure gentle serves as an inside courtyard. Within the atrium, a symbolic staircase, “Lily Pads”, features as a multifunctional open area to carry lessons and reveals.. ‘
A group from Yokohama Worldwide Faculty (see right here) particulars their imaginative and prescient for the brand new venture: ‘On the launch of our new campus design, we articulated a number of key rules as a part of an architectural temporary (see right here). The primary ones had been the need to make every area a studying area and to protect and improve the nice and cozy sense of group that individuals have after they now enter our faculty.
‘Following this path would be the creation of extra open areas, permitting studying to circulate flexibly out and in of school rooms, in addition to bigger widespread areas – each inside and out of doors – for group interplay.‘