Designed by Perkins&Will, Shenzhen Mingwan School spans a 40,996 m² footprint with 59,000 m² of total built space, located within Tencent’s Dachan Bay headquarters campus in Shenzhen — playfully nicknamed Penguin Island.
The school replaces the traditional rectangular classroom layout entirely.
Triangular teaching modules interlock to form a distinctive clover-shaped massing — a geometry that fosters an overlapping, connected learning composition while creating flexible, transparent indoor-outdoor relationships through a series of external corridors. This is what Perkins&Will calls the Learning Garden: shared facilities, public teaching areas, and communal spaces woven directly into the spatial logic of the building itself.
The architectural language draws on Eastern philosophy, translating the idea of seeing a world in a wildflower and a universe in a drop of water into the children’s daily spatial experience. The theater takes the form of a butterfly spreading its wings, symbolizing each student’s transformative moment on stage, while music and dance studios incorporate motifs of ripples and sails echoing the fluidity of melody and movement. The library is shaped by the undulating rhythm of mountains and ocean waves, becoming a calm sanctuary of knowledge within an otherwise dynamic campus.
The complex includes three interconnected academic buildings, a dedicated kindergarten, a multifunctional sports complex, and residential halls for nearly 600 boarding students — a complete K-12 ecosystem built to support interdisciplinary, future-focused education from its very first day.
Shenzhen, China
RAWVISION Studio
