The most successful education campuses, historically, have been designed around spatial relationships that encourage student interaction and communal bonding.
Learning takes place both formally, inside the classroom, and informally, with peers and teachers in social settings that allow students to connect the dots between related disciplines. These encounters exist in a network of interconnected spatial experiences.
When we entered the competition for a new 1.3 million-square-foot Institute of Technical Education (ITE) campus in Singapore, we saw an opportunity to intensify this network. We proposed a framework of layered spaces that interweave the five school and administration programs — Electronics, Engineering, Business, Design & Media, and Campus Services — into an interconnected, interactive web.
In a departure from the typical “silo” approach, in which each school stands alone, we proposed five curved, interlocking buildings surrounding a central plaza, with connections between them at all levels. The proximity and connections among schools help to bridge disciplinary divides, blur the boundaries of conventional education, and mirror the real-world dynamics of interrelated fields that transcend strict professional boundaries.
The web framework also adds activity and a third dimension to the public realm, via terraces and interaction spaces that overlook each other and the ground-level plazas. Through visual connectivity, these spaces transform the typically two-dimensional campus experience into a continuous three-dimensional educational fabric of interaction.