The Church of Christ in China Mongkok Church Kai Oi School
Description
The project is to develop an existing temporary park into a special school with 12 classrooms for students with mild intellectual disability ranging from primary school to secondary school. The project site is situated in Sham Shui Po adjacent to the Hoi Lai Housing Estate and covers about 4,400 sq. m.
The design aims to create an oasis-like campus that helps to create a visual focus in a calmer setting within the school building. This is to respond to this specific site in an urban context and surrounded by buildings or environments that may be visually unfavorable.
The provision of courtyard space in the heart of the school building facilitates sense of orientation for students and supervision by the staff which is in particularly important for special school. The main circulation space embracing the courtyard effectively links up various programmes. The design opted a low-rise approach to ensure the imminent visual connections between the courtyard and various levels of corridors. The multi-purpose area were broken down and allocated as pocket spaces on different floors of the building. These pocket spaces formed between the major programmes also act as buffers to the surroundings and to enhance diversity of space as well as providing easily approachable calm-down spaces for students on each floor.
Despite the unfavorable site contexts, the new campus can still flourish in the state of green and peacefulness. This coherent with the school mission in blooming the students with special needs.