ECOLOGY II: MOUNTAIN LEARNING
HKU SPRING 2019 DESIGN STUDIO


Studio Folio

“A stimulating environment is an environment that appeals to you, that provokes you and incites you to act. For this you must be able to place the signals and stimuli it gives off - that is, make them part of a familiar domain. Learning is the process of making things part of your domain: making something that was once beyond you your own…”
- Deschooling, Herman Hertzberger

The environment works as an agent of change of different natural and social ecologies. In the seminal essays of Herman Hertzberger, The School Building as a Micro-City and The City as a Macro-School, the Dutch architect proposed an analogical approach to rethink contemporary education experience by learning from the city. Cross-referencing basic typologies in school architecture and urban environment, a design technique emerges by hybridizing them into a new ecology for learning and living. In this studio, we explore the relationship between school architecture and the mountain fringes in Hong Kong. Our goal is dual-fold: to reinvent school architecture typology on the one hand, and to reintroduce spatial and ecological generosity back to the city on the other.




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