School for flower children

Many Vietnamese parents send their kids to public schools. But in the drab industrial city of Bien Hoa, some workers at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory send their little ones to a private kindergarten—one where grass, flowers and vegetables grow on the roof.

The building cuts an unusual figure in a landscape dominated by factory smokestacks.

Little Flowers Kindergarten is the product of an architectural competition launched by Pou Chen Group, a Taiwanese footwear manufacturer that employs about 20,000 people at its Bien Hoa factory. It was designed by Vo Trong Nghia Architects, a Vietnamese firm known for its environmentally conscious designs, and sits behind the factory’s parking lot.

The school—a continuous white building that loops, in oval-shaped ellipses, around three courtyards—is a study in environmental sustainability and cost reduction. Gaps in the structure help to generate cross breezes, for example, and the garden hoses on the roof spray wastewater that’s been recycled from the adjacent factory.

Thanks to these and other design details, including solar water heaters and an insulating green roof, the school uses about 25 and 40 percent less energy and fresh water, respectively, than a standard Vietnamese kindergarten would, according to Kosuke Nishijima, a partner at Vo Trong Nghia Architects. Those efficiency measures translate into an annual savings of 120 million Vietnam dong (US$5,400) on operating costs, said another partner at the firm, Takashi Niwa.

“This is the greenest school in Vietnam,” Hoang Thi Hoa, the principal, said recently in one of the breezy courtyards. “There was a lot of flexibility in this design because it was Pou Chen, not the government, that paid for it.”

Vo Trong Nghia Architects said building the Little Flowers school cost the Taiwanese firm about 43 billion Vietnam dong, or about US$1.9 million, including an architect’s fee of close to 9 percent. It has a gross floor area of nearly 4,000 square meters and was designed to hold 500 students.

The building, completed in 2013, has minimal air-conditioning, even though Vietnam has a tropical climate. But architect Vo Trong Nghia said its exterior concrete louvers and general orientation—in the path of the area’s prevailing winds—help to regulate temperatures inside the classrooms.

Nghia said one aim of his “farming kindergarten” was to teach children about agriculture and environmental sustainability through practical applications—the undulating green roof includes a small, and growing, vegetable garden. But the primary goal, he added, was simply to create a place where they could roam around and interact with nature.

“We don’t have a lot of space for children” in Vietnamese cities, Nghia said during an interview at his whitewashed office in Ho Chi Minh City, a dense metropolis of more than 7 million people that lies 35 kilometers southwest of Bien Hoa. “We are taking nature back to the city.”

Nghia, 38, is among Vietnam’s best-known contemporary architects. He has cited Tadao Ando and other minimalist Japanese architects as major influences, but his work also reflects an appreciation for a tropical climate and Vietnamese architectural motifs.

Among his most recognizable projects in Ho Chi Minh City are “Stacking Green,” a play on the traditional Vietnamese “tube house” in which open-air gardening beds—rather than glass and concrete—separate a home from the outside world, and “House for Trees,” a residence where trees sprout from rooftops.

His current projects include a planned university campus in Ho Chi Minh City with a tree-covered building designed to resemble a hilly forest, and a plan to mass-produce a lightweight, 22-square-meter home and sell it across the developing world. Nghia said the home, called the “S House,” would cost as little as US$1,500 and be designed to withstand tropical storms.

Nghia said he was also lobbying the Vietnamese government to draft planning laws that would require urban projects to include a minimum of green space. But officials, he added, have not yet expressed much interest.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon at Little Flowers, dragonflies and butterflies were circling the school’s courtyards as the sounds of giggling wafted out of classrooms. In a nearby garden patch on the ground level, spider plants were growing from Coca-Cola bottles, underscoring the school’s emphasis on recycling and sustainability.

Principal Hoa said teachers enjoy working at the school because students tend to be very relaxed in the classroom after enjoying so much outdoor playtime, and that there is fierce competition for spots on class rosters.

“Only the best workers at the factory get to send their kids here,” she said. “It’s very smart of Pou Chen” because the policy encourages productivity on the assembly line.

There are only two downsides, she said. One is that the school is so close to nature that children must share their courtyards with neighbors from the animal kingdom—such as bees and snakes.

And because the children are so small, she added, they aren’t very productive farmers. The school’s green roof may eventually be covered in vegetables. But for now, it is mostly just grass.

For more information

Website: http://votrongnghia.com/projects/farming-kindergarten-2/

Video: http://www.sparknews.com/fr/video/vo-trong-nghia-architects-green-architecture-better-global-future

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