Highlighting Colors and Geometry for Children
Tung Yuen Kindergarten is a two-story concrete building located in an industrial neighbourhood at the outskirts of Taichung, Taiwan. Designed by local architects Ospace with a total floor area of 725m2, the project is designed to excite children’s understanding and imagination of space. Through the arrangement of structure and elements, scale and place, it addresses concepts at the very core of architecture.
This building is situated in the northwest corner of a primary school campus. It is aligned to the adjacent road, but the entrance is recessed behind a canopy which is cantilevered at 45 degrees to the building, to align with the long axis of the site. This canopy provides rain cover for parents collecting children, but it also forms part of the activity terrace on the 2nd floor. The terrace continues along the building behind bright yellow columns, sheltered by the pitched roof. Its green railing balustrade adds to the happy, colorful facade overlooking the garden playground, which includes a circular hill for climbing and sliding down. The school gate and window frames are also green.
The front elevation is constructed as a typical house shape with double pitched roof, corresponding to the roofs of existing buildings and the domestic houses nearby. This white abstract façade offers the community its first impression of Tung Yuen Kindergarten.
Within the 2nd floor, there is a huge Y-shaped column which supports the double pitched concrete roof. It is formed by the intersection of three same-sized columns, forming a perpendicular relationship with the roof. The split column structure not only conveys the visual appearance of force transmission, but also the physical feature of sensing the heaviness of the big roof. The column, like those on the exterior, is rendered in bright yellow, which amplifies its legibility as an architectural element which even small children will understand.
Project: Tung Yuan Kindergarten / Location: Taichung, Taiwan / Architect: Office aaa / Project management: Tsai-Rong Ho . Structural engineer: Giant Home Engineering & Consultants / MEP : Heng Shuen MEP Engineering / Wayfinding system : Path & Landforms / Client: Tung Yuan Elementary School / Cost: 575,000 USD / Design: 2018 / Completion: 2020 / Photograph: Wei-Tze Chun
