Aranya Camp offers winter and summer camps for children and teens, hoping to bring only children into a temporary community close to nature. There were no projects at the time of the visit, and the whole camp looked a little deserted under the scorching sun.
Located on a ribbon of sand dunes in the middle of Aranya Coastal Resort, the entire building consists of a figure-of-eight ramp around two courtyards, one moving and one static, one outward as an open event space and the other inwardly surrounded by classrooms and dormitories.
The continuous ramp is like a giant treadmill, organizing a variety of different spaces like a diagram drawn by a stroke: the lower part surrounds the courtyard with temporary auditoriums, the lower part forms a sheltered cool and comfortable outdoor space, the second floor and the volume of the dormitory form a gray space under the eaves, the overlap of the ramps forms a small-scale roof activity space, and the end suddenly becomes steep into a slope like a ski resort. The change in the height, width and slope of the ramp creates a variety of interesting spaces in the upper and lower parts.
The landscape of the outer courtyard is not too verbose, and a Mongolian chestnut on the oval lawn becomes the focus of vision, transcending the landscape elements and becoming a part of the spatial composition, providing vertical lines that balance other horizontal elements, which can see the difference in thinking between architects and landscape architects when making landscapes.
A continuous ramp roof softens the roof and ground, blending a massive rectangular building with the surrounding nature. The opening of the façade is like a phantom of Tadao Ando's Awaji Dream Stage, the opening is the entrance, the framing frame, the exit through the hall, and the furniture for children to sit and watch the activities, in a subtle way to dissolve a long and huge corridor into a small-scale activity space.
Compared with the concrete columns, the steel columns better emphasize the ductility of the continuous slope, and the group columns of the diamond-shaped section visually weaken the perceived width of the large section through overlapping vertical lines, and the dark metal appearance and the inclined plane of the ramp edge make the overall visual appearance very slender, which is a very subtle and poetic treatment. In addition to the structural role, the steel columns also define the boundaries of the geometry as an architectural language.
The end of the ramp at the south end of the site is supported by several shear walls (some of which have been made into climbing walls), which is a bit cramped and hastily closed. Later, I checked the information and found that the designer originally placed a parent-child slide here, and the activities that were originally expected to occupy the entire ramp during the trial operation did not happen, but were replaced by more local activities, so they were temporarily canceled. The completion of a building does not mean the end of design, but in its life cycle, it prompts designers, builders, operators and users to re-recognize the original assumptions and assumptions.
Another quiet courtyard forms a cluster of settlement-like dormitories on the upper floor, while the lower floor provides daylight and centripetal force for the classrooms. The contrast between the two materials, wood and concrete, also perpetuates the dynamic and static duality on the scale of the material.
The different thicknesses of the wooden planks on the façade create a shadowy texture that creates a sense of kindness.
The interior space on the first floor also continues the austere style of the outside, and the entire material panel is composed of steel, wood, concrete, and glass. The choice of furnishings is all modern, and Heatherwick's gyro chairs are also found in the atrium.
The floor inside the student dormitory seems to be peeled by the humid climate by the sea.
Looking out to the sea from the rooftop. For some reason, the built ramp roof has a lot less small local activity space and facilities than the design drawings, and it seems a bit monotonous and empty. Compared to Tezuka's circular kindergarten, the skylights evenly distributed on the roof, the large trees protruding from the roof, and the net pockets enclosed around the perimeter are like the filling on the pizza dough, giving the children the possibility to stop and explore.
As a project based on surplus resources and leisure time, although there are many shadows of the circular kindergarten and Tadao Ando, the whole building reveals simplicity and sincerity under a strong experimental purpose, as a microcosm to explore the new possibilities of urban life, in this unused visit, I saw the collision between the designer, the developer and the educational brand, in the spark of collision, is nature, is the team, is independent, is free, is natural, is the curiosity that will never be extinguished.