Description

This was a scheme won in competition by the young architectural practice, Grüntuch Ernst. The brief was for a specialist science academy for high achieving students. Located on the edge of a new suburban community, the idea was that the school would attract people to live in this town in former East Germany, which is easily accessible from the centre of Berlin as an efficient suburban railway takes only 17 minutes from the Zoo Station.

The feel of the building does not seem particularly at home in its suburban setting, where manicured lawns and picket fences jostle for attention with neatly parked rows of Mercedes family saloons. This is suburbia with a capital S, very much on the lines of middle America suburban models. The pitched roof single-family housing has a higgledy-piggledy disorder, which is intended to be homely. The precise high tech architecture of the new school is more like a science research centre than a school. It almost feels marooned out here, at odds with its twee rustic surroundings. According to the architects, the school fits into its surroundings by marking a clear edge to the housing development and the Brandenburg countryside beyond. It is a sort of inhabited wall, which is intended to limit the spread of suburban architectural mediocrity.

The building is in the form of two main L shaped wings of classroom accommodation which are connected and linked at first floor level by a children’s play deck (the roof of the first floor) leading down onto the sports ground to the rear. These two organising elements grasp and enclose an open play court on one side of the block and a large community hall and sports hall on the other. The sports hall was deliberately buried within the deepest part of the building to reduce its triple-height bulk. From its sleek exterior, it is difficult to imagine that this building houses such a large volume of accommodation. The external façades, indeed the entire architectural treatment, emphasises the horizontal plain, with cladding panels in varying shades of shiny green aluminum. They are set within a precisely articulated module, which controls the window and wall panel proportions throughout. On the south-facing main façade windows, the entire face of glass is etched in tiny words from Marie Curie’s Nobel prize speech. The glass is also intended to control solar penetration and keep students cool. Indeed the interior of the building can only be described as cool.

We visited on one of the hottest days of summer, and the environment was very comfortable. Naturally ventilated throughout, the building utilises a system of night-time cooling, shaded opening louvres, through ventilation and solar control glazing supporting a very successful passive environmental system. However, it is also cool in another way, almost austere in its interior architecture, full of colourless light, reflecting from white or grey floor, ceiling and wall surfaces. Certainly the building bears little resemblance to the secondary schools I knew as a child, rather this reminds me of a high quality corporate headquarters, slightly mechanistic, yet emphasising quality and expense at every turn. It is definitely one for the future, a vision of how education might feel in 50 years time.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.