Institute

Space Park Leicester is designed as a robust, sustainable, and practical facility which can manage change and adaptation over a long life to suit changes in the requirements of the users, but is also intended to be a beautiful, attractive place that equally welcomes research specialists and schoolchildren, and manages to convey ‘something about space’ through its use of functional forms and long-lasting, recyclable materials.

Originally slated as a dedicated engineering center, KieranTimberlake worked with university stakeholders to reprogram the project as a multi-use, interdepartmental campus resource that facilitates the curricular needs of the next generation of design leaders, builders, and entrepreneurs. Echoing KieranTimberlake’s own rigorous research methods, the university and firm conducted studies of each academic department on campus to compile a list of key features and functions of the facility. The result of the research provided a mandate for KieranTimberlake to blend both flex spaces with fixed programming, where students from different disciplines and backgrounds can investigate, socialize, collaborate, and create.

The construction of a public educational institution benefits the surrounding community by providing a fundamental public service, but it does not necessarily qualify the urbanity of the place. It is not unusual for projects of this kind to seek segregation between the inner space and the surrounding city, justified by the intention of protecting students from the stimulus of worldly life, and allowing them to concentrate on their studies. 

Renovated from the ground of Nguyen Van Huyen primary school, The Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) occupies an area of 2.127sqm, of which the construction area is 1800 sqm. The site is designed to house infrastructures for the National Program for the Development of Mathematics (2010-2030); with customised space to host international, cross-discipline exchanges.

Pre-existing. Sant Miquel dels Sants High School is located in the historic centre of the city of Vic. The program has been configured around a dark and unoccupied inner courtyard that forces very long routes to move between the different classrooms. At the same time the high school has almost no open spaces and the common spaces are reduced to the corridors between classes.

Designed to embody the values the Wade Institute strives to impart to its students of the Masters of Entrepreneurship, creativity, and sustainability, Lovell Chen’s new teaching building in the grounds of Ormond College presents a series of contrasts.

The Fábrica de Cultura: School of Arts and Popular Traditions complex in Barrio Abajo, a working-class neighborhood in Barranquilla, Colombia, is built into an abandoned Tobacco Factory, adding a new building and offering a public square for the Barrio.