School as A Connected Village
Location: Chaohu, Anhui, China | Educational Campus | 260,000 sfLead: Jiageng Guo, Hacken Li
Team: KNOT Architecture
Status: Invited Competition | 1st Prize
Chaohu School transforms the constraints of a steep site into a connected landscape for learning. Rather than flattening the terrain, the project works with the existing topography: a 400-meter playground is positioned along the lower southern edge to minimize excavation, while academic buildings step with the slope around a shared central ground.
The school is conceived as a small village rather than a single institutional block. Classrooms are organized into interconnected clusters around eight courtyards, creating distinct neighborhoods for different student age groups while maintaining visual and physical connections across the campus. Southwest-facing classrooms maximize daylight, while changes in elevation naturally separate programs without isolating them.
Courtyards, terraces, planted roofs, and covered connections extend learning beyond the classroom and blur the boundary between building and landscape. The result is a compact educational campus where circulation becomes social space, and the topography becomes part of the learning environment — a connected village shaped by the landscape it occupies.