Keystone May 2025

Keystone Academy in Beijing, which has now become one of the major bilingual international schools in China, celebrated its 11th anniversary in May, and saw the graduation of the Class of 2025 (see Keystone graduation 2025)

Luke Hughes Designs Ltd is delighted and proud to have been intricately involved with all the spaces that articulate the essence and values of the founders’ vision, in particular Keystone’s Lecture theatres, dining hall and the High School Library.

In their publication ‘Local Culture in a World School – the Chinese Thread at Keystone Academy’ the authors Dr Sally Booth and Min Dai wrote: ‘like a good teacher, the built environment is an influential element in the learning process when it is well organised, practical, flexible and adaptive. Successful learning environment generate possibilities for social exchange, creativity and aesthetic appreciation of beautiful things in the daily lives of students and teachers’… ‘the High School Library, as a result of the design and reconstruction by Luke Hughes and the ideas of librarian Song Jingming, has become the hallmark of the school, a space of beauty and meaning, an area that tells the story and embodies the very heart of the school, the very essence of the Chinese Thread’.Luke Hughes’s first visit was in 2013, when the site was merely concrete and dust. Former graduates have since gone on to Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Middlebury, Columbia, St Andrew’s, LSE, UCL, King’s College London and many other top western universities.

The photos of the students’ recent graduation ceremony show a set of ‘FOLIO’ stacking oak chairs redeployed for the ceremonial occasion from the High School library. It is the same classic chair design that is now used at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, London Library, Oxford Bodleian Library, UCL, Yale, Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, the Royal Collection and Historic Royal Palaces.

One former Keystone student, now at Cambridge University, remarked recently how delighted he was to visit Selwyn College Library and recognise many of the features he had so much enjoyed in the High School Library at Keystone in Beijing. Quite so!

See: Keystone Library, Keystone lecture theatres, Folio lookbook and Libraries (projects)

And the graduation photos Keystone graduation 2025