The new Ge Hekai Hall at Wenzhou-Kean University was recently unveiled by Los Angeles- based Moor Ruble Yudell (MRY). Envisioned as a permanent home for the university’s architecture and design academy, the building was designed to be flexible enough to welcome and be used by all students across the campus. It includes spaces for other academic departments as well as social, study, and event areas, and extensive surrounding green spaces.
The Wenzhou-Kean campus is a 175-acre site surrounded by mountains in Wenzhou, about an hour south of Shanghai. It is a satellite campus of New Jersey’s Kean University and the master plan was designed by the office of renowned architect Michael Graves. Both the architecture and design schools at the campus’s center are named in Graves’ honour.
The building is anchored by an 800-seat central forum featuring tiered seating layered over three stories, surrounded by open balconies. The east and west wings of the structure are connected via an overhead bridge.
The structure’s three-floor base is comprised of eight oblong shaped buildings laid out like bars clad in striking Angola black granite. These areas host café and social spaces, community and classroom spaces, creative spaces such as a digital media auditorium and creativity labs for makers of all types of art and design. Dramatic and deep inset ledges showcase the three-foot thickness of the walls while serving double duty by providing interior shading and hiding mechanical equipment and ductwork.
Capping the oblong foundational bars are two studio loft buildings which form the upper two floors and host more traditional architecture and design studio spaces. These are bright and light in contrast to the black base, and designed to offer high quality daylight which is still able to be managed by the addition of high performance concrete (UHPC) sunshades. The lower floors offer punched windows to complement the theme of light penetration and a melding of indoors and outdoors to reflect the beauty of the lush campus gardens and surrounds.
Ge Hekai Hall all and its attendant buildings together serve as a thriving campus hub which embodies and showcases all the tenets of inclusive, thoughtful, and innovative design as well as providing space to nurture the next generation of thought leaders. Various disciplines come together to learn and share under one umbrella as the diverse and inspirational space offers an incubator for students to craft new visions of the future.
