Columbus, Indiana
This 72,000 square foot public school for kindergarten through grade six is built on sloping twenty-two acre site three miles from downtown Columbus. The three story wing at the site’s lower end stacks classrooms hierarchically under one roof. On each floor two symmetrical suites of four 900 square foot classrooms are partitioned with moveable walls, allowing for the combination of two classrooms. Each couplet shares a glass-walled area for independent, yet supervised work.
The compact classroom wing communicates by a system of ramps with the specialty and service areas contained in a large eroded square in plan. Each quadrant of this square contains a different activity center: library, cafeteria, gymnasium, and art and music rooms. The double height, north-lit library is adjacent to the classroom wing, and its central location is designed to encourage student use. The library also contains a free-form balcony for story-telling and more intimate reading. The ramp system runs directly along the south side of the library, and is flanked by a glass-pane wall affording views into an outdoor courtyard.
Across from the library and separated by the courtyard is the cafeteria, kitchen and services on the south side and a curved stage area at the west end for group presentations. The cafeteria’s canted, glass-paned, north wall allows views back and forth and allows transparent interpenetration of the two spaces, giving the stepped courtyard space in between a compressive energy.
The southeast quadrant contains physical education facilities. The northeast quadrant containing art and music rooms and special classrooms has a semicircular vestibule feeding off the main north entry.
This vestibule serves compositionally as the displaced center of the scheme. With the convex entry to the classroom wing at the west end of the building, it defines the main axis of circulation and primary horizontal datum. The terminus of this axis is indicated on the east elevation by a canopy over a secondary entry, while the horizontal datum is marked on the north and south elevations by change in coloration and material.
This combination of gestures suggests one of the design’s formal strategies: the pulling out of the academic wing from the square plan along the trajectory of the ramp allowing for the possibility of reading the classroom wing as a displaced fourth quadrant and the library/ramp/courtyard space as a tensile intermediary “void”. Such relationships make the architecture both dynamic and unified.
克里夫蒂溪小学是一座位于印第安纳州哥伦布市的公共文化教育建筑，由建筑师Richard Meier设计。该建筑占地22英亩，建筑面积为72000平方英尺，为幼儿园至六年级的学生提供教育。教室楼为三层，设置了两个对称的四个900平方英尺教室套房，每个套房之间有可移动的墙壁，可以将两个教室合并使用，共享一个玻璃墙分隔的区域。学校的特色区和服务区位于平面图中的一个大的侵蚀广场中，通过一系列坡道与教室楼相连。广场的四个象限包含不同的活动中心，如图书馆、自助餐厅、体育馆和艺术和音乐室。学校的设计充分考虑了学生的行为和需要，如图书馆的中央位置和玻璃墙的配置，以鼓励学生的使用和参与，以及自助餐厅的倾斜、玻璃墙和阶梯式庭院的设计，营造出活力和活泼的氛围。该设计的另一项特色是将教室楼从广场平面图中拔出，并沿着坡道的轨迹排列，使教室楼成为一个偏移的第四象限，而图书馆/坡道/庭院空间则成为一个拉伸的中介“虚空”，这种关系使建筑具有动态和统一性。