Yixuan Liu

advisor

University of California, Berkeley

United States of America

Yixuan Liu has led multiple high-profile architectural projects from concept through construction,… more

Kashitu School embodies an architectural logic that is clear, purposeful, and economically conceived based on the constructs of providing buildable, climate-responsive, and locally empowering architecture. Its clarity of organization and modular order establish order through the lateral use of ICEB bricks produced locally, representing respect for context and acknowledging the considerations of building within real constraints. Its simplicity is its strength. It proposes an architecture based on rationality, teachability, and community responsibility. Yet among this rational clarity is one noticeably missing dimension of humanity: the emotional, spatial, and symbolic elements of place and experience. While the design is certainly effective as a responsive system, it falls shy of being a livable environment where young people may thrive, relax, and dream.
To elevate the project, the design must transition beyond technical efficiency toward spatial empathy. There could be opportunities to insert moments of softness, irregularity, and encounter within the existing grid, such as courtyards with shade and breeze, semi-outdoor study areas, and transitions of light that arrange the daily rhythm. Materially, the combination of the honesty of earth and timber products with some hint of warmth or texture could provoke a greater sense of belonging. Functionally, there would be better clarity around the distinctions of the teaching, living, and social zones, increasing daily experience and privacy, while remaining true to the modular logic. In summary, for the next iteration of Kashitu School, the emphasis is not on building more, it is about building deeper, turning its structural clarity into an architecture that also breathes, shelters, and inspires.
The project holds strong promise and potential to be realized as a thoughtful, context-responsive school that can truly impact the lives of its students and community in rural areas.

A few aspects to consider:
1. The design is strong from a rational standpoint (modularity, materials, process of construction), but in relation to architecture as a medium of life and educational purposes, it is more related to instrumental rationality and less to building familiarity with a poetic or ethical spatial condition. A school needs to be more than simply functional: it needs to inspire belonging, curiosity, and rites of passage. The repetitive grid conditions currently produce a highly normalized landscape, clear on its purpose, but emotionally thin. Architecture should be a mode of education, achieved through changes in scale, sequences of light and shadow, pauses along pathways, and semi-private niches for encounters. These qualities remain. Additionally, the concept of "co-construction" is excellent, but could be more readable: the campus itself should properly narrate a process of making and memory, rather than being predominantly read as a technical artifact.
2. Placing classrooms, dorms, and staff housing within the same module aids construction but requires another layering of noise control, privacy, supervision, and circulation. The current grid is not fully effective in demonstrating the distinction between primary and secondary circulation. I suggest using a clearer hierarchy of zones so that social/active space and learning wings remain connected though they can be separated physically or visually when required (for example, by locating communal functions in a terrace courtyard with a node projection or elevated slightly further into the ground and leaving classroom blocks calmer and more enclosed).
3.A boarding school also has to have a high degree of awareness of gendered needs: privacy and secure routes for female dorms, adequate lighting at night, and comfortable menstrual hygiene facilities that extend beyond the minimum basic health requirements. Toilets should provide lockable doors and handwashing facilities and storage for cleaning items. Systems for traversing the building at night, managing visitors, and student curfews demand both physical infrastructure and management systems (i.e. staff presence at a gated night post, controlled entry to the dorms, staff rooms in sight for supervision). Meet the needs of the school for a secure perimeter while supporting the community’s desire for access by placing community-related activities (like markets or a hall) in a buffer zone of controlled access rather than impermeable walls.