Some of the guest speakers during a panel at Qatar Foundation’s inaugural ‘Learning from Education City’ conference.

 

Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) recently hosted a two-day architecture conference, titled ‘Learning from Education City’.
The event brought together a number of internationally renowned thinkers and architects to examine Education City’s architecture and showcase some of its state-of-the-art projects. It also served as a platform to discuss and debate the development.
Ameena Ahmadi, technical director at Qatar Foundation Capital Projects Directorate, said: “When designing a building for Education City, architects are not working on a common building; we aim to deliver the highest quality to students. We believe that an educational environment is not your everyday space, it has to be something special that offers imaginative opportunities for learning.
“We like to think of educational spaces as places for informal learning. Learning does not just happen in the classroom. We take into consideration the spaces that surround the classroom.”
Fatma al-Sahlawi, a Qatari architect said: “Education City is an architectural model, one that students can learn from. The buildings are designed to limit heat and sunshine, which is a climate-friendly and sustainable approach. They depend on courtyards and openings for cross ventilation. This is rare to find in the region.”
According to al-Sahlawi, architecture stimulates learning when the space is specifically designed to encourage contemplation, creative thinking, and concentration through the amount of natural light provided and the visual layout of the structure.
The conference also brought together some of the architects who worked on the structures within the Education City. Ali Mangera, designer of the award-winning Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies discussed his work and his use of ‘knowledge and light’, while Kelly Hutzell, associate teaching professor in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar gave a talk titled ‘Setting the Scene’.


Related Story