Tung Yuan Kindergarten

Office aaa

ARCHITECTS
Office Aaa

MEP ENGINEERS
Heng Shuen Mep Engineering

STRUCTURE ENGINEERS
Giant Home Engineering & Consultants

WAYFINDING SYSTEM
Path & Landforms

PROJECT MANAGER
Tsai-rong Ho

CLIENTS
Tung Yuan Elementary School

PHOTOGRAPHS
Tze-chun Wei

YEAR
2020

LOCATION
Taichung, Taiwan

CATEGORY
Kindergarten

Tung Yuen Kindergarten is a 2-story concrete building located in an industrial neighbourhood at the outskirt of Taichung city.

With total floor area of 725m2, this work attempts to construct children's cognition and imagination of space.

Through the indivisible arrangement of structure and elements, scale and place, school architecture can also return to the introverted thinking of architecture itself.

This building is situated in the northwest corner of the campus, facing the existing 6M roadway, which forms an angle close to 45 degrees between the road and the existing building.

The configuration of the building conforms to the road while the recessed entrance canopy is then turned 45 degrees to align the exiting campus axis.

This canopy is supported by a 45-degree column that forms the activity terrace on the 2nd floor. The front elevation is constructed as a typical archaic house shape with double pitched roof outline; it corresponds to the roof of the existing buildings and the domestic houses nearby.

This white abstract façade becomes the first community's impression of Tung Yuen Kindergarten.

On the 2nd floor, there is a huge Y-shaped column that supports the double-pitched concrete roof. This Y-shaped column is formed by the intersection of three same-sized columns, forming a perpendicular relationship with the roof.

It is split column structure not only has the visual appearance of force transmission but also the physical feature of sensing the heaviness of the big roof.

The column is then rendered in bright yellow, which turns it into a legible architectural element of this children’s learning place.