Hasta La Ideas

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Caged balconies provide open-air corridors that are sheltered from harsh sunlight and tropical rain at this school in Vietnam by architects Vo Trong Nghia.

Vertical concrete louvres and perforated screens create the cage-like facade, which shades the corridors from direct sunlight whilst letting in the breeze.

The entire school is contained within a single five-storey building to keep both students and teachers dry during the rainy summer season.

The walls of the building are curved to snake around two courtyards and the roof slopes up gradually from the ground to the top floor.

Binh Duong School is located in the town of Di An, just north of Ho Chi Minh City, and provides teaching facilities for up to 800 junior and high school students.

The school is nominated for an award at this year’s World Architecture Festival, alongside a house with a vertical garden on its facade by the same architects.

See more schools on Dezeen »

Photography is by Hiroyuki Oki.

Here’s a project description sent by Vo Trong Nghia:

Binh Duong School by Vo Trong Nghia + Shunri Nishizawa + Daisuke Sanuki

Binh Duong, a new city which is 30 minutes away from Ho Chi Minh City, has a typical tropical climate all year round. The site is located in the middle of a flourishing forest with a wide variety of green and fruits, running rampant. This is where folks spending their time under the shade of trees. To pursuit a beautiful life, people are in harmony with the nature, making the border between the inside and the outside ambiguously. From the very first impression of the site, we tried to embed the building into the site by delivering this Vietnam-oriented generous spirit of natural land into the school design, which will eventually have 800 students.

The building is located in 5300 square meters abundant land, consisting of a maximum height of five levels, with the intention of being surrounded by the height of the forest around. Pre cast concrete louvers and pattern walls are used for envelop of the building. These shading devices generate semi-outside space, these open circumstances avoiding direct sunlight as well as acting like a natural ventilation system for the corridor space. All the classrooms are connected by this semi-open space, where teachers and students chatting, communicating and appreciating nature.

We designed the school as a continuous volume in order not to disturb any school activities. This fluidity concept is inspired by the endless raining of the typical tropical climate, where raining season lasts from May to November each year.

This continuous volume has a gentle slope surrounding the two courtyards as a geographical hill, lessens the aggressive height between the building and the peaceful site.

The school is designed as an S shape, connected to the ground at one end, curving around two courtyards with two different characteristics. Front yard is used for public space, serving for formal events such as meetings of the school. Backyard is more private, where students spend their personal time.

Teacher rooms; gym, laboratory and library are located around the front yard, while common students’ classrooms are arranged around the back yard. The open space flows throughout the circulation to help teachers and students enjoy various activities of the two courtyards with rich natural surroundings.

Thus, we intended this school to be borderless between the school activity and surrounding nature and also not to destroy the current abundant forest as much as possible. In this open school, students enjoy their life learning the generous spirits of nature. This is our alternative proposal for school design in Vietnam.

Site plan – click above for larger image

Floor plans – click above for larger image

Section – click above for larger image

South elevation – click above for larger image

East elevation – click above for larger image

The post Binh Duong School
by Vo Trong Nghia appeared first on Dezeen.

Ready your tympanic membranes, design fans, because the fall runneth over with auditory delights. Mere weeks after the publication of David Byrne’s How Music Works (McSweeney’s), the Yale School of Architecture will present “The Sound of Architecture,” an interdisclipinary symposium exploring the auditory dimension of architecture (you may recall that Byrne himself is a pioneer of the building-as-musical instrument mode).

Yale professor Kurt Forster and Ph.D. candidate Joseph Clarke have lined up a veritable orchestra of experts—from fields as diverse as archaeology, media studies, musicology, philosophy, and the history of technology—to address the largely unconsidered aural dimension of architecture. Sessions include a keynote lecture by Elizabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), who will reflect on the role of sound in her firm’s early media artworks and its more recent architectural interventions at New York’s Lincoln Center; Brigitte Shim (Shim-Sutcliffe Architects) on the architectural calibration of a house designed for a mathematician and amateur musician; and John Durham Peters of the University of Iowa on the “theologically embedded soundspace” that is the Mormon Tabernacle. Also not to be missed is Yale professor Brian Kane’s discussion of “Acousmatic Phantasmagoria,” which only sounds like the affliction of a doomed Edgar Allen Poe protagonist. The symposium, which is free and open to the public (pre-registration will be available soon here), takes place October 4-6 at the Yale School of Architecture. Fingers crossed for an opening Frank Sinatra medley by Bob Stern!

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From left: judges Billy Paretti (Hennessy), designer and Pratt alum Harry Allen, and Jennifer Yu (Hennessy), with Michael Cook and his winning work, competition mentor and judge Futura, and faculty advisor and judge Jeff Bellantoni. (Photos: Rene Pérez)

Ithaca, New York native Michael Cook and his mixed media work hopped to first place in the Hennessy-sponsored competition that challenged a group of Pratt students and recent graduates to produce work that illustrates the “wild rabbit.” The contest was part of the cognac house’s collaboration with street artist Futura, who has splashed his signature colored helices on a bottle of Very Special (V.S.) cognac and mentored the competing students. Cook, who graduated from Pratt in May with a BFA in communications design (and a concentration in graphic design) and now lives in Brooklyn, took top honors for a piece that incorporates sculpture and video. He received a cash prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris for the October launch of the Hennessy V.S. bottle customized by Futura. As Cook prepares for the show of his recent work that opens Saturday at HomeGrown Board Shop in Ithaca, he made time to answer our questions about the competition, his winning work, and why graphic design is more than adjusting text boxes in InDesign.

What was the original brief for this collaborative project with Hennessy?
The original brief from Hennessy was to create a piece of artwork, of any medium, that related to the theme of “chasing one’s wild rabbit.” This was aligned with the brand’s mantra of “Never Stop. Never Settle.”

How did you respond to this theme and what did you create?
I used this starting point to conduct an exploration of what it means to me to be an artist and ultimately what it is that I want from art. There seems to be a myth, or a misconception, that being involved in graphic design means you spend your days in front of a computer adjusting text boxes in InDesign. I realized pretty early on in my art school education that that wasn’t going to be me, so I would usually try to find ways of conveying the same ideas in ways that allowed me to use my hands and explore different formats.
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“In early childhood, children develop a set of symbols that ‘stand for’ things they see in the world around them. You may remember the childhood landscape you drew at about age six or seven. You probably had a symbol for trees (the lollipop tree), the house with a chimney and smoke coming out, the sun with rays, and so on. Figures and faces had their own set of symbols. I believe that this system of symbols is linked to acquiring language, and is rightly viewed as charming and creative adults.

Children are happy with symbolic drawing until about the age of eight or nine, the well-documented ‘crisis period’ of childhood art, when children develop a passion for realism. They want their drawing to realistically depict what they see, most especially spatial aspects and three-dimensionality. But this kind of realistic drawing requires instruction, just as learning to read requires instruction. Our schools do not provide drawing instruction. Children try on their own to discover the secrets of realistic drawing, but nearly always fail and, sadly, give up on trying. They decide that they ‘have no talent,’ and they give up art forever.”

–Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, now available in a revised and updated fourth edition from Tarcher/Penguin

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