Description

Many rural communities are keen to revitalise their local facilities and develop new qualities beyond offering peaceful surroundings – both to attract those seeking to move away from the cities and to retain their local populations. The village of Gundelsheim in Upper Franconia was for a long time a typical village strung along a central street to the north of Bamberg in northern Bavaria. Over time, as a product of successive waves of suburbanisation in recent decades, its linear structure evolved into a circular shape. While the village expanded, its centre languished, becoming increasingly dominated by through-traffic. To improve the situation, the verges of the main road were repaved, and the parking spaces replaced by park benches offering a view over the tranquil Leitenbach stream. Part of this renewal included a new community library, housed first in the school, then a day-care centre and the town hall, though in each case the solution was unsatisfactory.

An invited competition resulted in a design for a library building with a simple but distinctive appearance. Schlicht Lamprecht Architekten extended an old Franconian farmhouse in the centre of the village, adding a double-gabled building that picks up the form of its neighbour but is set apart by its slatted timber façade of pre-greyed ash. The basic principle takes the traditional constellation of farmhouse, stable and barn, and arranges them alongside rather than behind each other to create a twin-gabled barn. Its design is not so much a stylisation of regional historical architecture, but the adoption of a form derived as far as possible from the existing building. It was, therefore, essential that the existing house from 1802 was retained. The structure was largely gutted, and a spruce timber structure installed within it. Terrazzo flooring of the kind commonly used in historical farmhouses, was laid, also in the new buildings. Likewise, the brick wall and Prussian-style capped-ceiling of the old barn was incorporated into the extension on the left-hand side.

On entering the library, one is met both by an unmistakable sense of the new, with its clean sanded, light-coloured wood panelling, and of the old with its whitewashed brick walls and brown-red structural beams. A further nod to former rural construction can be seen in the house-in-house strategy, which occurs twice in the building: the wooden children’s area is designed as a new house within the shell of the old, while on the other side, the service areas and toilets echo the idea of the grain store within the barn of a barnyard. The gable end of this small house is made visible in the screen of slatted battens that clads the façades. Elsewhere – apart from this gable end – every second batten has been omitted, creating a clear but permeable skin around the structure. The main entrance, slightly offset from the central axis, again alludes to the barn doors of times past. The fact that a building of this kind was realised in a community of just 3,600 residents testifies to the political will and commitment of the local stakeholders and the availability of funding for rural development.

Originally published in Bauwelt 18.2021, pp. 44-47, abridged and edited for Building Types Online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

 

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