Montessori School Ingolstadt

Mark Dudek

Description

Schools are by their very nature institutional. Here the architects for this Montessori school in Ingolstadt-Hollerstauden have deliberately set out to break down the institutional feel. They have achieved this by articulating the various parts of the school with different architectural forms, creating a campus of smaller buildings each with its own character. The architects took as their inspiration the work of Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger with study trips arranged to look at a number of his projects. They were particularly interested in the form of the classrooms with a less authoritarian non-directional arrangement, and in the way in which the fluid relationship between the inside and the outside spaces was promoted. Thus the green external areas can become learning and teaching spaces in their own right, functioning as extensions to the somewhat confined classroom areas. The location for the new school was an edge of town green field site with ample space to spread the building across its attractive setting. Rather than one large building, the school is broken down into five smaller two-storey buildings each with its own functional logic. Thus there is the secondary school for 240 pupils, the primary school for 180 children, the kindergarten for 30 children, a special needs building with therapy and small group rooms and a community centre with management offices, seminar rooms, a kitchen and canteen.

The individual buildings are organised to create a central communal green area. With classrooms and other areas such as the library and canteen opening onto it, the courtyard is full of life and activities, an environment which encourages social interaction between different age groups. Here the detail design is particularly important with level thresholds between the inside and the outside, pupil planting and cultivation areas and a special tree relating to each one of the classrooms to provide shade and to enhance the distinct symbolic identity of each year group. Although the central area is predominantly communal in atmosphere, each classroom has its own wooden deck surrounded by hedges and high shrubs to provide a degree of enclosure and privacy for teaching sessions to run without too much visual distraction. Although the architecture generally shares some common features, such as window types, roof projections, and wall paneling, the interior treatment of each building varies. Staircases are constructed in slightly different ways, there is a subtle variation in lighting quality between each building, and most particularly, each has a very particular geometrical form, which becomes apparent at first floor level in the shape of the communal hall. The primary forms, the circle, the square and the triangle are used as major organising devices within the community centre, the secondary school and the primary school respectively. This provides legibility for easy way finding, without sacrificing the inherent spatial complexity of this fascinating architectural collage. An inspiring and unusual approach to architecture for education so often dictated by the prosaic principles of order, control and discipline.