Interior courtyard at NYU Shanghai.
Graduation day celebrations on campus.
NYU campus within Shanghai’s urban framework.
The project earned “Honor” for Excellence in Planning a New Campus, becoming the first Chinese project to earn the title.
On Monday, April 15, The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) announced its 2019 Award winners across Planning, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture categories. As the only winner within its category, NYU Shanghai represents KPF’s success in designing a complex to meet the school’s ongoing curriculum needs on a global stage. Located in the growing Qiantan district, the new campus forges connections between academic and local communities and translates cultural values alongside programmatic needs, representing the institution’s mission to provide a dual-gateway: for Chinese students to the world and for international students to China.
Through dialogue with key stakeholders and experts, the KPF team addressed a number of distinctive Sino-American criteria within the site, such as integrating NYU’s mission to provide a liberal arts education with the Chinese desire for more specialized programs. Additional research on successful examples of cultural integration confirmed the need to organize the campus in a loop of related program to further these interdisciplinary relationships. The resulting campus design comprises a pinwheel arrangement of four different buildings, producing a ring of diverse, collaborative spaces and organizing a variety of outdoor scales from expansive quad to intimate alcove. These contrasting qualities of inward courtyard and external facade evoke fundamental ideas of academic landscapes across cultures, from European cloisters to Chinese gardens.
NYU Shanghai crowns KPF’s portfolio of award-winning academic work completed in the last several years. This collection includes business schools at the University of Michigan, Arizona State University, and Morgan State University; buildings for NYU Schools of Nursing and Law; research facilities at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Centers and the University of Minnesota; and international buildings such as the Peking University School of Transnational Law.
The SCUP Excellence Awards program is a juried competition that showcases how using strategic, integrated planning can result in exemplary buildings, grounds, institutional success, and careers that inspire. Read more about the Society’s mission here.