This proposal for a school housing five majors (furniture, industrial, communication, textile and fashion design) located on the frontier of Shanghai’s urban expansion is developed around the possibility of ecology as social agenda. This prompt forced us to look critically at what ecology really means, despite its ambiguous ubiquity in contemporary discourse. By recasting ecology as a method for understanding how groups of people, meteorology and even other species interrelate, the project refashions architecture not as a static mass of materials but as a facilitator of the spatial ebbs and flows which define when and where these various agents in our environment relate by mere adjacency, intersect or entangle.

Constructed on an artificial wetland site amid a new campus masterplan, the project envisions the inherent constraints of an unideal ground (too wet) and strict climatic considerations (Shanghai’s hot, wet summers and surprisingly cold winters) as fundamental aspects in establishing design prerogatives: massing is shaped to permit sunlight to pass through, façade systems regulate heating, slender vertical columns carry the weight of the foundation without sinking into the porous earth. The building thus functions akin to a spatial filter between the center of the campus and an adjacent public canal.

By evaluating the constituencies of students, faculty members, academic departments, other schools on the campus, the public and even natural forces (wind, light, wildlife et cetera) on site, the project considers the role of architecture in a cultural moment defined by an increasing complexity in our understanding of both natural and human systems, especially as they begin to enmesh with one another. The school therefore speculates on architecture not as an a priori element responsible for defining relationships without external context but rather as a stage on which the machinations of life between various participants – be they human, thermal, floral/faunal – may play out.