Lin’an Valley of the Wind School is located on an open site among the grassy hills in Lin’an District, outside the City of Hangzhou, with the goal of creating a basecamp of outdoor activities for the young students.
The vicinity of the site is mostly undeveloped lands in their original natural forms, but the permitted site area is also extremely limited, at only 2,804 square meters. Therefore, to fulfill all the program and function requirements, the floor area ratio must be close to 2.0, which significantly exceeds the standard 0.8 FAR of typical school building complex and becomes the major challenge in the design of this project.
Based off the comprehensive concept of “school in the nature”, the form of this school building architecture should be an existence that can both unify large area of outdoor space in entirety and fully reflect the spirits of youth and outdoor sports. Therefore, we take the paper plane which can carry the dreams and ambitions of the young students as inspiration of the building form, “releasing” the architecture into the air like a paper plane being released by the students.
The project will be completed and put into use in the near future.
Bio Guowei Zhang received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the UCLA and his master's degree from both Harvard and MIT. He once served as the Chairman of ChinaGSD of Harvard Student Union, and organized and led Harvard's China trip. He is currently the founder and principal architect of GWP Architects. He was elected as a director of Harvard University South China Alumni Association in 2017, and was elected as one of the top ten Chinese design elites in 2018. He later served as the DEC co-founder of the Huaying Association.He elected as Vice Chairman of Shenzhen Industry Alliance in 2021.
Other prizes 2021 Brisbane Design Awards Gold Winner 2021 Gold Nugget Awards - Award of Merit 2021 MUSE Design Award Platinum Winner 2020 REARD Global Design Award Gold Winner 2020 MUSE Design Award Platinum Winner 2020 ICONIC AWARDS: Innovative Architecture Winner 2020 Outstanding Property Award 2019-2020 Asia-Pacific Design Competition-Golden DiamondAward
