K -8 Ch inese Immers ion Schoo l

Northampton 20/20 Proposal:

Architect Team:Emily Kim, Madison White, Tingyu Zhang, Mengjie Zhang, & Alejandra Garcia

Chen j i n

Chenjin, the Chinese word for immersion, captures our vision of an inclusive community that fosters international cultural understanding. Our school design aims to extend language learning in the classroom to cultural immersion in the wider school environment. Our design creates the base for a such a community by mixing elements of traditional Chinese culture and modern immersion school design. We believe that our school design is essential for Northampton’s concentration on diversity education and tolerance, as the children educated there will gain a better un-derstanding of an unfamiliar culture and language. The City of Northampton has stated in their Comprehensive Plan that they wish to foster a commitment to “inclusiveness, tolerance and civic-mindedness by embracing diversity” (5). It is essential that part of this commitment concentrate on tolerance education for Northampton’s youth, and our school design clearly supports this goal, fostering not only language immersion, but cultural immersion as well, a necessity to reaching wider community goals.

THE IDEA

With a pre-existing Chinese Immersion School serving the Pioneer Valley, it is quite reasonable to question why our school design proposes to build from the ground up. We believe that the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School, as a re-furbished and repurposed building, is not sufficient enough for the full immersion of students linguistically as well as culturally. It is vital for such a space to be built from the base up, so that the building as well as the setup of the school fully encompasses the cultural immersion learning environment we are trying to create with our immersion school. While the Pioneer Valley Immersion Charter School creates spaces for lan-guage immersion, it is inadequate for Northampton’s stated goals. Our immersion spaces include social spaces for language practice and a tradi-tional Chinese garden for cultural and environmental education. As cultural immersion is central to our design, we wanted our structure to reflect this idea. To this end, we de-cided to use the universal form of the circle for its symbolic importance in both Daoism and Buddhism. The following design plans include discussions of the school’s location, proposals for general site use, and floor plans of the proposed building. We will not be discuss-ing landscaping and secondary structures in this preliminary proposal, as we wanted to stress the flow and fundamental spaces of the school for the initial design process. While the spaces that are not specified in the design are generally similar across all school types, the school building, as the central place of learning for the students, re-quired more attention in creating an immersion environment.

THE SITE

In choosing the school location, we made sure that the site was nearby a large residential area with a higher percentage of population under 18. This makes the space easily accessible to a larger population of residents, so that if the school administration chooses to open the facilities to the community, it will be in an area that will make this possible. The large flexible spaces we designed for the building would be easily trans-formable to different community needs. In choosing the location, we also took the safe-ty of our students into account. The proposed site meets our safety standards because it is in a low crime area and is far from any high traffic roads. In the same vein, the site is accessible to potential buses and driving parents via Meadow St. The land is large enough for us to put the school far enough back from the road for students to be pro-tected from any traffic.

±LegendImmersion School

Building Footprints

Rivers and Lakes

roads

Surrounding Area

Madison White, Alejandra Garcia, Emily Kim, Mengjie Zhang, Tingyu Zhang Date made 25.04.13

This map demonstrates close proximity to a pletheraof residential areas necessary to support a school.The property is easily accessable by a road and thesize of the site is sufficiently large for our proposed project.

0 0.35 0.70.175 Kilometers

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0 0.55 1.10.275 Miles

LegendImmersion School

Building Footprints

Percentage ofPopulation under 18

0.000000 - 4.761905

4.761906 - 13.513514

13.513515 - 22.222222

22.222223 - 35.000000

35.000001 - 58.333333

Percentage of Population under 18 in Surrounding Area

Madison White, Alejandra Garcia, Emily Kim, Mengjie Zhang, Tingyu Zhang Date made 25.04.13

We thought it is important to have the school in an areawhere there are suficient number of children.Servicing the local neighborhoods will lower the bus costs aswell as better integrating the school with the community.

THE DESIGN INSPIRATION

In Daoist thought, the circle is related to Tai Chi, representing the circulation of life and nature while in Buddhist practices, drawing or walking in a circle symbolizes attaining perfection and a high-er spiritual state. The circle is then calming and self-improving. These practices are meant to take years to perfect, reflecting our desire to convey the message that learning is a lifelong practice. We chose the circle in the hope that the children would reflect and improve themselves as well as reach academic perfection.

We want to keep the highly active and learning spaces sep-arate, so that children have an environment where they can both play as well as sit down and do their work. Because of this we decided that the sports field and playground should be outside the school circle. The large property also provides space for a parking lot and a vegetable garden. It is so large, in fact, that it provides space for future building if ever necessary.

*Map NOT to scale

THE PROPOSED LAYOUT

In thinking about materials for the design of our building, we decided to go with brick. We chose brick because it is the most suited to the local climate and is common of the local architecture. We also designed the roof to be slanted so that snow will not damage the building during the long winters common in Northampton. Additionally, we developed indoor social spaces as well as a gym to provide play space for the children during the cold weather.

THE CLIMATE

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We designed large classroom spaces so that teachers could provide flexible learning environments for all kinds of learners. In order to provide spaces for immer-sion education outside of the classroom, we developed social spaces as well as an expansive Chinese garden. The social spaces are meant to provide a different learning environment and to facilitate discussions outside the classroom so the students can practice their Chinese language skills. The Chinese garden provides a space for more cultural and environmental education.

AN IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENT

We decided to place the art room inside the Chinese garden to immerse the stu-dents in a different environment. In this way the garden and the school building can provide a learning opportunity for the students so that they will be more aware of their surrounding environment. Placing the art room within the garden, as opposed to any other learning space, allows the children to be more active within the garden, making it more integrated within the learning experience of the students.

THE ART CLASSROOM

THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE GARDEN

The garden is in the center of the building, with a covered walkway around its circumference. The walkway, unlike the main building, would be built in traditional Chi-nese style, with red painted columns and tiled roof. There would be a small artificial pond and small hill (an incline) which the art classroom would sit on top of. We would implement Massachusetts native plants for environmental education for the students as well as to keep it as sustainable a space as possible. In keeping with traditional Chinese garden architecture, we would also include a pavilion, a small outdoor social space similar to a covered patio, which could be used by teacher if they wanted to take their students into the garden.

The garden will be integrated into the school program by providing educational and calming spaces for the students. Plant studies as well as environmental sustainability education could take place within this space. The plants and space would also provide inspiration for the art students at the center of the garden. In addition to the Chinese Garden, we are proposing a vegetable garden in order to allow a more hands on learning environment for educa-tion on plants as well as healthy eating.

An example of a traditional Chinese garden

THE INTERIOR SETUP

As a charter school, we imagine the student body to consist of approximately 40 students per grade, divided between 2 classrooms. This would allow smaller class sizes so that discussion-based learning, which is essential for immersion schools, can take place. We also included labs so that the students could have access to spaces where equipment can allow scientific experiments to be safe. A computer lab would be accessible within the library space, which was placed on the bottom floor so it would be easily accessible to all grades. Other spaces that are common in elementary and mid-dle schools which we included are: a nurse’s office, administration, cafeteria, the head of school’s office, and bathrooms.

As is common practice in elementary and middle school design, we decided to make the gym a performance space as well.This is because it is the only space on campus where all the students can fit indoors. This means that it can meet both athletic and performance program needs. Creating this shared space will cut down on building and maintenance costs while providing space for both programs.

DUALITY IN USAGE

THE CHALLENGES

Our first challenge was finding a site that was large enough to support a K-8 school campus. Because of this, we opted to use land which is currently labeled as cropland on city planning maps, so we would need to change the zoning laws sur-rounding this area. As a piece of land adjacent to a residential area, our site can be reasonably transferred to education zoning. To make the site suitable, changes in bus routes may also be required. Our last main challenge is the potentially dwarfing entrance to the building. Al-though we meet standard architectural practices of a 10 foot entryway, the fact that the entry lies between the two two-storied buildings could create an intimidating effect for younger students. We plan to address this problem by putting in a sculptural feature in the front of the entry way in order to funnel students into the buildings. This would cre-ate a more gradual feeling of restricted space to prevent a claustrophobic effect.

While there are a few challenges to making the design and site work, we be-lieve that it is a small price to pay for the advantages our school can provide for the Northampton and surrounding community. The site is safe and in a low crime area in addition to being accessible to a lot of younger residents. It is also big enough to allow for all the different facilities which are so important to our program, as well as space for any future expansion. The inclusion of a traditional Chinese style garden, social spac-es, and design references to Chinese culture creates a unique learning environment for the students. The design also provides large size classrooms so the interior spaces can be flexible for all kinds of education programs. Additionally, we designed the gym indoors to offer sport spaces for children on cold days and as a performance space as needed. Our design will help the city of Northampton reach its goals of cultural toler-ance and inclusion.

OUR STRENGTHS

IMAGES USED

Gym:http://www.ericksonhall.com/site-media/cms_page_media/103/TerraCottaGym_5.jpg

Bricks:http://images2.layoutsparks.com/1/219690/welcome-to-myspace-bricks.jpg

Roof:http://www.curtislumber.com/images/roof-diagram3.gif

Chinese garden:http://img.lotour.com/test/chinatour/200908/img376147.jpg

“Academics - Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School.”Academics - Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2013. <http:// www.pvcics.org/academics>.

United States of America. City of Northampton. Sustainable Northampton. Compre hensive Plan. By Clare Higgins et all. N.p., Jan. 2008. Web. 5 May 2013. <http://www.northamptonma.gov/uploads/basicContentWidget/5763/Sustainable NorthamptonPlanFinal.pdf>.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

architecture

E.KimM.WhiteT.Zhang M.ZhangA.Garcia