(Sophie)Xiaofei Wu_Compacted Building for Future Campus

Students not only study in campus but also live in campus. At present, the buildings on campus are either for studying or for living. Students keep traveling between where they live and where they live. But, how it would be like if a building is for both studying and living? How it would be like if the building for school is combined with apartment, gym and library?

In Marseilles Unite Habitation, Le Corbusier firstly combined living with different service functions, adding shops and public facilities to the apartment building. With shops, restaurant, pharmacy, barber, and laundry, the building itself is like a small city, where people could meets their basic needs without going outside. Here, Le Corbusier shows the example of multi-functional living apartment. Forty years later, in S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas argues that the complexity generated by superimposition and combination of functions brings architecture opportunities to build new relations and interactions through reprograming. “… what matters is the structure of the building and the position of the vertical communication shaft. Overall structure on one hand, and position of stairwell and elevator shaft on the other, define the available space.” Interactions happen in all available space defined by the overall structure. Adding to Le Corbusier’s “free plan”, Koolhaas are proposing a “free section,” in which interactions happen horizontally but also vertically.

For future campus, buildings are no longer occupied by one single function. Teaching, living, learning and exercising, multiple programs will be compacted into one building on the basis of Corbusier’s free plan and koolhaas’s free section, which brings the interaction between living and studying, and providing a new lifestyle for students.

As Koolhaas mentioned, within a building, “available space” is defined by the “overall structure”. To compact multiple programs into one single building, it entails architects to reconsider the adjacency among these programs and the relationship between programs and the “overall structure.” Here are two points. On the one hand, the “overall structure” is no longer limited to the structure against gravity but also an infrastructural structure that realizes the connection and interaction between different programs. On the other hand, this compactness has to allow flexibilities that enable the building to resist to the change of students’ and faculty’s needs according to different time. It has to adapt to these changes.