Description

The Heinz Galinski School is the first Jewish primary school to be built in Germany since the Second World War. Its construction was not only a functional necessity but also an act of great symbolic significance for the City of Berlin and the renaissance of its Jewish community. Located in Charlottenburg at the northern edge of the Grunewald Forest, the architect Zvi Hecker has adopted a highly expressive architectural form which can be interpreted as a dramatic reinvigoration of the strength and creative energy of the Jewish people in Berlin. This message is embodied within the exploding kinetic drama of the plan form, which seen in its three dimensional architecture, is a collision of angles and sharp swirling folds of solid and void. It is almost impossible to capture in a single photographic image, rather the building can only be read as a series of moments which are both partial and whole.

The architect describes it in his own more poetic language: ‘The sunflower is a metaphor and a symbol of organic growth. The light of the sun makes its form, it is the source of its life. Education, knowledge, is the light which illuminates children’s minds. The nature of ourselves depends on the quality of education we have received.’ Clearly, whatever symbolic reading one places on this, the fundamentals of the educational process have been used as a representation of optimism and a purposeful future for its pupil body. Unlike many schools, it rejects the purely functionalist dictum of education as a social discipline, rather it seems to be suggesting that education is also about self-discovery, a sense of belonging to a community based around an idea of collective faith; there is even a degree of anarchy embodied within the labyrinthine spaces between its rooms. In the architect’s own words, it is like ‘a big family house’, with numerous places in which the pupils can hide and create their own sense of mystery.

This is no place for the casual visitor, and its architecture recreates the complexities of the city with its walkways, passageways and cul-de-sacs. It must be a great place to go to school. The school’s schedule of accommodation called for a mixture of large- and small-scale spaces with some 40 classrooms, but there is also a curriculum emphasis on the creative disciplines with art/workshop spaces attached to each classroom group. There is a multi-purpose hall for 500 (which can be used as a synagogue), a dining hall and two kitchens for meat and milk, in accordance with Jewish traditions.

All of the rooms are shaped to fit the exigencies of the overall form yet they are in the main completely functional spaces. Classrooms are linked and each has its own external terrace so that students can enjoy views of the forest beyond. All rooms are connected by way of a sinuous twisting corridor, arguably the only area which does not need to be straight. This school design is a one off, an icon, made for its special context, part memorial, part futuristic sculpture. It commemorates the lost children of Berlin, yet celebrates their future within the framework of the new Jewish community in the city. Its curving fragmented forms must make attendance fun, education as a form of play. Perhaps more school designers should be given the freedom to design a school in such a way, so that it becomes far more than the ubiquitous ‘machine for learning’.

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