How Adaptive Reuse Saved Peking University's Last Teaching Building from the 1980s

The Building Nobody Noticed

Campus architecture has a way of becoming invisible. Students rush past the same facades for four years, rarely registering the bones of the place. At Peking University's Yanyuan Campus, one structure along Wusi Road had slipped so far into the background by 2015 that administrators marked it for demolition without much fanfare. The Educational Technology Building, completed in 1988, was simply in the way of newer plans.

What caught the attention of FEI Architects during an initial site visit was not the building's aesthetic merit but its historical position. This was the last surviving teaching facility from a nearly forty-year construction period spanning the 1960s through the 1990s, an era that coincided with China's Reform and Opening-up. The structure had housed the campus's largest auditorium and served as a nerve center for lectures, symposia, and student gatherings. Demolishing it would erase a chapter of institutional memory that no amount of archival photography could fully restore.

The question facing principal Michelle Yip and her team was whether preservation could be made to serve contemporary programmatic needs or whether saving the building meant turning it into a museum piece. The answer arrived in the form of a new client: the School of Mathematical Sciences needed a home.

Massing Strategy for a Constrained Site

At 11,174 square meters, the renovated building occupies a modest footprint by university standards, yet it must accommodate lecture halls, research offices, seminar rooms, and informal gathering spaces. FEI Architects retained the original structural grid, a pragmatic decision that avoided the cost and carbon footprint of demolition while allowing flexibility in interior layout.

The facade treatment departs from the building's utilitarian 1980s skin. New fenestration patterns introduce a rhythm that responds to interior functions: larger openings mark collaborative zones, while smaller, more regular windows align with individual offices. The material palette leans toward restraint. Light-colored cladding and metal detailing offer a quiet counterpoint to the heavier masonry vocabulary of adjacent campus buildings without attempting pastiche.

We have covered numerous adaptive reuse projects in recent years, and the most successful tend to resist the urge to erase all traces of the original structure. Here, FEI Architects left portions of the existing facade visible at strategic points, allowing the building to read as a palimpsest rather than a wholesale replacement. This approach echoes Herzog & de Meuron's work on the Tate Modern or David Chipperfield's interventions at the Neues Museum, where historical layers remain legible.

Interior Reorganization and Circulation

The 1988 layout prioritized large, flexible spaces for audiovisual equipment and tiered lecture halls. Mathematical research, by contrast, thrives on proximity and chance encounter. FEI Architects carved out a new circulation spine that encourages vertical movement and visibility between floors. Open staircases and double-height voids function as informal seminar spaces, places where faculty and graduate students can collide outside the rigid schedule of the classroom.

Materiality inside the building shifts according to use. Polished concrete floors in high-traffic zones transition to timber in quieter study areas, a tactile cue that supports wayfinding without signage. The auditorium, once the building's centerpiece, has been subdivided into smaller lecture halls with acoustical treatment suitable for presentations and defense sessions. This move sacrifices some of the original spatial drama but gains programmatic versatility.

Lighting design plays an understated but critical role. Rather than flooding every space with uniform brightness, the architects introduced layered lighting that allows rooms to adapt to different activities. Seminar spaces feature adjustable task lighting, while corridors rely on indirect natural light filtered through translucent panels. The effect is a building that feels calibrated rather than generic.

Contextual Dialogue Within Yanyuan Campus

Peking University's campus is a patchwork of architectural periods, from early twentieth-century courtyard buildings to mid-century modernist blocks. The challenge for any new or renovated structure is to contribute without shouting. FEI Architects chose to work with scale and proportion rather than ornament. The building's height aligns with neighboring structures, and setbacks along Wusi Road maintain the established street wall.

Landscaping around the perimeter reinforces this contextual reading. Native plantings and permeable paving replace the asphalt apron that once surrounded the building, a modest gesture toward stormwater management and biophilic design. Outdoor seating areas extend the interior circulation logic, creating thresholds where the boundary between building and campus blurs.

This is not a landmark project in the sense of announcing itself from a distance. It succeeds instead by embedding itself into the daily rhythms of campus life, a quality that architectural photography often fails to capture. The building's value lies in its sustained usability rather than its capacity to generate striking images.

Preservation as Forward Practice

The eight-year timeline from initial discovery to project completion reflects the complexity of adaptive reuse within institutional contexts. Securing approval from university administration, coordinating with Beijing Institute of Architectural Science, and navigating heritage review processes all required persistence. The project, completed in 2023, stands as evidence that preservation need not be reactionary.

In an academic environment increasingly shaped by rankings and capital campaigns, the impulse is often to build new rather than steward existing resources. FEI Architects demonstrated that a 1988 building, far from its centennial and lacking the patina of historical designation, could still merit careful intervention. The School of Mathematical Sciences now occupies a facility that connects present scholarship to the institutional memory of a transformative period in Chinese higher education.

At World Archi Design, we have tracked a growing recognition that mid-century and late twentieth-century structures deserve the same curatorial attention once reserved for older heritage buildings. This project contributes to that conversation not through polemic but through patient, materially informed design. The result is a building that functions as both archive and instrument, a place where the past remains present without dictating the terms of future use.

Credit: Fangfang Tian