Mulan Village

Mulan School and Educational Landscape
Guangdong Province

Highways and high speed rail links proliferate across China enabling the vast movement of goods, labourers and raw materials to sites of production and consumption. Although connecting many isolated areas initiating urbanisation and investment opportunities, in some instances the impact of infrastructure can have detrimental local effects: farmland is bisected; villages divided; and the environment can become degraded.

In Mulan Village, the construction of the high speed rail created a huge incision into the landscape and a repository of unstable earth at the back of an existing primary school. This school was designated for expansion and our commission was to design an educational landscape involving the creation of a new school block, a toilet and a playground.
Our strategy was to organise the site as a series of sequential open spaces for play and study. The loose earth was re-contoured and a toilet and reed-bed filtration system inserted to retain the slope, wrapping the basketball court and creating pocket discovery gardens.

2012 Size: 500 sqm Total Cost: 90,000 usd Unit Cost 180 usd/sqm