COMMON TECTONICS: AARHUS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
Architecture must relate to urbanism. Under this premises the design for the new Aarhus School of Architecture wants to establish a relationship between the educational facility and the city fabric through a highly inspiring space totally open to the users. The school is conceived as a social condenser where students, city officials, professors and international visitors can use the same space to share knowledge, information, for the advancement of the discipline.
Taking inspiration from the richness of the site, we have conceived a building with a section inspired by the typical pitched roof in the area. However their aggregation evolved according with the angles of the sun during the different seasons maximizing the quantity of light and heat on the roof surface.
The resulting composition is a succession of faceted roofs in Cor-ten steel and glass. The large glass panels create openings on the upper floor to allow natural light in the studios and learning spaces.
The massing of the building has been elevated to maximize urban porosity at the ground floor allowing communication with the surrounding areas and the exterior functions. The functions have been conceptualized as a collection of primary shapes distributed in a physical volume that provides the frame for their organization. It is the urban fabric of the city entering the ground floor, which contains the most public activities while the studios and the laboratories have been placed in the upper floor.
The floor slab is organized on slight different levels, like small depressions on the ground plane providing proper separation from one activity to the other without the confined physical boundary of a wall. Walls are dissolved into low semi-transparent or solid partitions for privacy, or reconfigured into volumes within the spaces.
The double height voids are moments to showcase 1:1 architectural models of building components and placed in a way to be visible from the many informal learning areas. The main shapes within the floor plan have functions assigned according to a timeline where many other activities can happen throughout the day maximizing the use of the spaces. Interior floors and roof are framed in exposed steel and concrete planks, with integrated air and services distribution in the core voids. The resulting architecture aesthetics is characterized by the raw presence of concrete revealed by the interplay of natural light flooding the spaces from the skylights.
The landscape design distributes functions around three urban courtyards protected by a green wedge on the south-east side with permeable paving that incorporates bio-whales filtering polluted water.
The school is a hybrid vision of the future that combines bridge tectonic, loft spaces, theoretical learning with practice and human requirements with scientific principles.
