Dafeng, China — 250 km north of Shanghai, Yancheng Prefecture, Jiangsu Province.
Year
2005 - 2007
Client
Icona Srl (initial client) · Jiangsu Technology Group (local client)
Typology
New build
Status
Completed
Dafeng Technical College is Base engineering's first international project. Between 2005 and 2007, some 250 km north of Shanghai, in a historically agricultural region of Jiangsu province, the studio designed a technical and vocational campus for 6,000 students, on a site of around 150,000 square metres. The local client was the Jiangsu Technology Group; the client who brought Base to China was Icona Srl. The challenge was not only one of scale: it was cultural. It meant translating the ambitions of a rapidly expanding Chinese client into a Western design method, sustainable and structured - without flattening either one. The college thus emerged as an educational device and, at the same time, as a dress rehearsal for Base's ability to work across borders: governing the complexity of a large public-private project within an entirely new regulatory, linguistic and cultural context. It is the case that opened, for the studio, the cross-cutting dimension of international projects.
Project Site Plan
The Project
Overview
The project concerns the construction of a school campus of about 150,000 sqm in Dafeng, a city in a historically agricultural region of Jiangsu province, about 250 kilometres north of Shanghai. In the years of the project the area is undergoing imposing demographic growth - a forecast of half a million new inhabitants in five years - that requires educational infrastructure on an industrial scale: the new technical college is sized for about 6,000 students aged between 12 and 16, with an investment of 135 million RMB. The operation arose from an exchange: the owner of the area built the new school in return for existing school buildings, whose volume he would subsequently recover to build residences. The plot, surrounded on three sides by the road network and bordered on the fourth by a watercourse, is organized according to a cross-shaped layout with a central tree-lined axis and a fifth point of reference at the centre, following traditional Chinese cosmology. The architectural language also draws on local tradition: the chromatic symbolism of bright red, the wooden shutters. For us it is the first international project: the commission - concept, masterplan and final design - opens up the dimension of projects beyond national borders.
The Challenge
The first challenge was one of timing: to present to the Municipality of Dafeng, in a very short time, the design of a campus of this scale. The second, deeper one, was cultural: to reconcile the ambitions of a rapidly expanding local client with a structured Western design methodology attentive to sustainability - without flattening either of the two. Working in China in 2005 also meant governing a large project within a regulatory, linguistic and cultural context that was entirely new to us: the college was the testing ground of our way of working beyond national borders.
Pre-Development & Governance
In China, education is a complex system: students arrive from different parts of the territory and must find in the campus all the services they need to reside and carry out their activities, including sport. For this reason the project was discussed from the outset with the school and political authorities, building step by step the consensus needed for a work of this size. The preliminary phase also had to hold together the educational programme and the real-estate operation that made it possible - the exchange between the new school and the volumes of the existing school buildings - up to the approval of the project by the municipal administration.
Systems & Technical Coordination
We developed the project - from concept to final design - and accompanied it up to the approval of the municipal administration. The execution phase followed the local model: the contractor drew up the construction and detailed drawings following our design indications, with constant oversight of the consistency between the approved design and its constructive translation. Technical coordination also included the linguistic dimension of the project: all the deliverables were produced by our studio and integrated with captions in Chinese, so as to be fully usable by client, administration and contractor.
Process Management
Local coordination was developed by our Nanjing office, which acted as a hinge between the studio and the Chinese counterparts: local client, school and political authorities, contractor. We produced all the drawings, later integrated with captions in Chinese, and managed the architectural component directly throughout development - maintaining the direction of the project even at a distance, in a process where cultural mediation counted as much as technical control.
Value Added
For the territory: an educational infrastructure serving an area in very strong growth, capable of welcoming about 6,000 students and of producing a lasting cultural impact on teaching across a very wide territory. For the client: an operation made sustainable by the volume-exchange mechanism, brought to approval in rapid times. For us: the studio's first international project - the experience that opened up the dimension of projects beyond national borders and defined a method, made of local presence and remote direction, that we would carry in the following years into other contexts. A visit to the campus in 2017, ten years after the design, allowed us to reread the project in the light of how the area actually developed.
