Chaoyang Future School | Crossboundaries

No fixed chairs and tables but user-controlled, modular furniture. No teacher-centric podiums and blackboards but stimulating, collaborative work and learning spaces. To embody its namesake, the Chaoyang Future School by Crossboundaries has to work differently. That means it has to think differently.

Chaoyang Future School, in Beijing, is the latest iteration of Peking University’s pedagogic model for China’s future creators, in their continued exploration with Crossboundaries to manifest places and spaces that embody their collective vision. 

The large 26,000m² renovation of an existing educational campus built in the 1980s completely reassesses the landscape, facade and interior. It uses color to negotiate from the urban scale to the human, and multi-functionality to assist both guided and passive learning.Densely arranged, the existing campus mirrored its tight urban surroundings. Inside its six buildings, faceless corridors were lined with rooms lacking identity or coherence. However, like the Affiliated High School before it – the first collaboration of Crossboundaries and Peking University– Future School needed to explore the demands of the school to serve the realm of a community.
Learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom but throughout the campus, exponentially raising the value of this tight urban area. Formulating a crossover of the in and out and the public and private, the school creates a village that delivers to individual needs, catering to both students and teachers where they will eat, sleep, play, study, learn, and explore.