ZS Hope Primary School at Leiyang Maoping Village

Leiyang, located in the south part of Hunan province, is the home place of Cai Lun, the inventor of paper-making in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 CE). Maoping, which is 30 kilometers to the south of Leiyang, is a small mountain village with its simple folkways. Surrounded by hills on all sides, the village and its houses continuously spread out by following the topographical contours of hills and valleys£¨ with the ancestral shrine at its center.

On July 19, 2006, rainstorms and mountain floods caused by Typhoon “Bilis” destroyed the original buildings of the primary school in Maoping Village. Zhejiang Association of Commerce (ZS) in Hunan Province urgently raised 500,000 RMB on July 29, 2006 for building a new primary school—the ZS Hope Primary School, Maoping Village.

The design team involving Wang Lu, Lu Jiangsong, Huan Huaihai and Zheng Xiaodong designed a school based on the way of life of the locals as well as modern contemporary life. This creates a piece of work that not only evoke memory of the past, but keep alive the good tradition of local residential buildings.

The selection of building materials  are  isomorphic to local houses, and the scale of its gables is largely commensurate with the surrounding houses. The use of small sky-wells to break up the spaces provide interesting spaces that relate to  the local environment. Red bricks are used for the building so as to have a better dialogue with the surrounding houses; whereas the limited amount of those surviving large grey bricks are applied to roads, paths, and open grounds.

The success of this low cost building has got to be its sensitivity to the local climate and building materials. The architects have created a place of learning for children not confine to the walls of the classrooms, but is a collection of local experience and village life mixed into one.