Shenzhen Primary School

Haian (Coast) Primary School, part of Shenzhen Nanshan No.2 Foreign Language School and developed by China Resources, is a campus landscape designed by IF (Bense Creating). The school's layout follows a typical Chinese public-school model: a sports field on the east side, teaching blocks on the west and south, with the ground floor given over to library, gym and club rooms and fragmented atrium gardens, and a second-floor platform linking the teaching blocks. Above that, classrooms and staff offices rise to a rooftop garden. All landscape spaces were roughly defined by the architecture, but their value had to be discovered through landscape design. Drawing on self-determination theory - autonomy, competence and relatedness - the team treats the in-between spaces between classroom and playground as the places where children's curiosity, exploration and social needs are really satisfied. Letters, colour blocks, stacked wooden decks and planters turn the indoor-sports-hall roof into a place where learning, socialising and play interweave; when children arrive, their imagination far exceeds the designers' predictions. The second-floor platform, originally purely a circulation link, becomes vivid when children sit, lie, jump, hide, chase, talk and think on it. The team also reserves flexible display space for campus arts festivals, flea markets and club gatherings. Colour, plants and light - three natural elements - carry the school's celebration of growing: brightly coloured planters, a rooftop experimental field and corridor green belts, and a tall jacaranda in the main-entry courtyard, as upright as a primary student reaching for light. The broad steps up signal the start of study; ten-minute breaks are for flying free; rainy summer evenings are calm; at night teachers, too, are children heading home. Across 13,408 square metres, the project is a seed sown for teachers, students and parents to cultivate over generations.