The university was completed in 1997. It holds a cafeteria, two large lecture theaters and a cluster of examination rooms.
It was recognised as a "rendezvous and exchange point, creating a new center of gravity" where it was conveiced on the hub of a campus serving fourteen facilities and research facilities. This was to embrace the university experience with the social encounters of the cafeteria space, the leaving and exchange in the auditoria/classrooms and the individual rights of passage played out in the examination hall.
The building conceives of attempts in generating forms of social encounters. It seeks potential of overlapping between individual programs and encouraging exchange between users of its diverse functions, while allowing a pragmatic use of individual space.
"Synthetic Landscape" a metaphor that OMA uses to describe the characteristics bluring of inside and outside. THe main entrance is seen as a tilted ground plane and urban plaza that then continues as an interior sloping 'field' which the two auditoria are placed like figures in the landscape.
"Social magic carpet" a metaphor that is used to describe the roof of the building. The rising floorplate, which folds upwards and back becomes the wall and the roof of the building. This creates an urban landscape of play and social encounters inparted into the architecture. The ampitheater and the examination rooms are described as interiors set into the landscape due to the folding floor.
The spatial structure is designed to mainly act as a netwrok in where individuals, i.e students, are free to discover their own shortcuts and to mavigate through the builging. The design of the building is to seek a synthetic landscape where it opens to individual choice.
By reffering to the diagram, it is seen that the building for its size and complexity, it s a very shallow structure, i.e. all major spaces and accessed within six levels of depth. The building has three functional "attractors"; the auditoria, the examination room and the cafeterial - each of which is coupled with a major social circulation space.
The four major foyers form a series from the ramped plaza on the exterior to the main foyer, which leads upwards to the foyer and then back to a balcony foyer outside the examination room. The main foyer also operates as a control space through which all of the open circulation systems within the building pass.
The educatorium is described as a "factory of learning". While knowledge is produced in the research centers, fragments of this knowledge are revealed in the spetacle of the lecture theaters, discussed in foyers and cafeteria spaces and exammed in enclosed rooms. The spatial diagram illustrates the depth of the location in these sources. The knowledge that is brought into the light or the social space is located on the shallow term of the diagram. The deeper the spatial structure gets, the more private/enclosed the social encounters become i.e. examination rooms. The spaces where students perform are found deep within the 'hub'.
The Educatorium becomes partially reserved.
The examination zone is five to six levels deep within the building; here it does not receive the level of architecture that is featured in the shallow zones. Here the field of play stops and work begins. Although all examination rooms have multiple points of entry, they are each end points to spatial movement.
One can read the Educatorium as a radically inovative building at its shallow levels with a conservating depth. All the socialization, contact and the sharing of ideas all take place in the shallow network. This implies in the legitination of institutional being located in the deepness of spatial structure.
The two key metaphors of "synthetic landscape" and "factory of learning" reflect the ways that the field relations of the landscape have been imported into the factory to urbanise the building.
Throughout this, Koolhaas's work enbodies a dialectic between the freen and the tree like institution structure.
The circulation system in this building is in many ways a masterful piece of design, but it achieves by integrating such programmatic innovation with entrenched spatial genotypes.
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