Banyan Below, Music Above: Music School Landscape Renewal

This project reimagines the forecourt of the School of Music at Fujian Normal University as an educational landscape where teaching, performance, and everyday campus life converge. Once fragmented and underused, the site is transformed into a shared environment that supports formal instruction, informal rehearsal, artistic exchange, and public gathering, while renewing the cultural identity of the school through landscape, architecture, and music.

Rooted in the university’s long history and the regional context of Fujian, the design draws on two intertwined themes: banyan culture and Nanyin musical heritage. The banyan tree, a familiar symbol of shelter, continuity, and collective memory in southern China, inspires the new canopy system, shaded gathering spaces, and the spatial language of rooted growth. Nanyin Gongche notation, one of the most distinctive carriers of local musical tradition, is reinterpreted in paving patterns, cultural walls, and environmental graphics, allowing regional music culture to become part of the site’s material and visual fabric.

The proposal is informed by surveys from 175 users, which revealed urgent needs for weather protection, instrument transport, rehearsal overflow, and flexible outdoor teaching and performance space. In response, the design introduces a banyan-inspired entrance canopy, a covered corridor linking teaching buildings and practice rooms, the Heart Island Stage with a shallow water system, terraced performance seating, shared practice nodes, and interactive sound installations. Together, these elements support small concerts, pop-up performances, festivals, teaching, rehearsal, rest, and social exchange.

The project also redefines circulation as experience. Paths, seating, planting, and performance zones are arranged to encourage spontaneous encounter, outdoor learning, and shared cultural events, while maintaining the calm rhythm needed for practice and reflection. Spaces for movement, pause, rehearsal, and audience gathering are carefully interwoven rather than separated.

Rather than treating the plaza as a decorative foreground, the project positions it as a living platform for music education and cultural participation. It creates a place where architecture and landscape work together to make learning more open, performance more visible, and heritage more tangible. By weaving together memory, music, and everyday use, the renewed landscape becomes both a campus commons and a cultural landmark rooted in place.