Gray Space Of University Teaching Building And Design Of Communication Function

Since 1999, the number of enrolling students for higher education in China has rapidly increased. With dramatic extension of quantity and scope of our country's universities, the meaning of higher education is changing significantly as well. Now, higher education focuses more on training of integrating, inter-disciplinary, creative talent. The area for learning and living is no longer limited within the classes, but extended to the whole campus. Instead of traditional teacher-driven classes, the interaction not only between teachers and students but also between students is promoted. Furthermore, higher education is emphasizing the enlightenment from interaction between different disciplines and the spirit of teamwork. Therefore, there are more and more architects and planners pay attention to creating communication space in campus.There is a wide range of understanding the meaning of campus communication space. From every single building to the whole campus, communication spaces are everywhere. Different types of communication spaces have different forms of communication activities. It is necessary to choose one particular type of communication space and do a thorough research on it. Based on the humid and hot climate in southern China, this essay concentrates on grey space of education architecture. With survey and research on people's activities in grey space, this article analyzes and generalizes the physical environmental requirement for people to activate in grey space. Combined with the theories of environmental psychology and environmental behavioral science, it tries to propose a design principle that encourages people to interact in grey space and improve the performance of grey space.Because of the difference of accessibility and enterability, according to observation and analysis on people's activities in grey space there are huge variations of people who involved in communication and modes of communication. Therefore, grey space can be divided into"outside grey space"with strong accessibility and"inside grey space"that is lack of accessibility. Those two types of grey space should be classified and researched separately by different ways. In order to propose a design method that encourages the communication,"outside grey space"should be analyzed based on precedents and theories. For"inside grey space", the research should focus on case studies. By using the maps of behaviors that are observed during different cases, it generalizes the distribution and behavior features of communication activities and how to treat grey space to encourage communication. Finally, for motivating the communication, this essay summarizes the design principle for campus grey space in universities.