Description

The urban site for this new school is close to the city centre at the intersection of two busy roads. The site comprises a long thin strip of land between two four-storey residential blocks. Classrooms turn their backs on the heavy traffic streets opening up to the predominantly residential west side. This is part of the architects’ concept which they describe as a building where the rooms are positioned logically, ‘where they ought to be’. However, the overall effect is much greater than this modest statement suggests. The entrance is on the south side, set back from the road. It comprises a grand flight of stairs which takes you up to the raised ground floor, forming a sort of ‘piano nobile’ where the main communal spaces, such as group rooms, cafés and offices are located. From here you can either go down via a range of open staircases, to the ground or basement levels, containing a sports hall, music and drama rooms and the library; or up to conventional suites of classrooms and the rooftop art studio complete with viewing gallery providing vistas across the city.

This is a building which celebrates the circulation areas as promenades where people are likely to meet each other and hang out. Entering into and through the building, a passage­way carries the visitor all the way along its entire 150 metre length. One is enclosed in an atmosphere of varying modulated light, a route which naturally leads you up towards a glazed three-storey high roof above a large communal space. Roughly at the centre of the plan is this enclosed winter garden, with angled fenestration, staircases and galleries which are pitched and skewed to create a dynamic space full of warm light. This has become an important social focus for the building, either for children to use during the day, or as an evening forum for concerts and other performances, connecting the school into the patterns of the local community. In order to reduce the impression of length, the architects have introduced angles into the planning of the solid classroom blocks.

The anti-orthogonal organisation deliberately subverts the ordered linearity of the housing blocks on the opposite side of Pestalozzistraße, creating a more humane, almost organic architectural form which fits its context in scale terms, yet shouts out how special it is in architectural terms. Here is an architecture of schools which sets out to show how special it can feel to be in education. Every vista within this internalised circulation world provides a context for social interaction, whereas classrooms are largely conventional enclosed spaces for formal learning.

The building unfolds like an exotic plant, enclosed in thick ochre-rendered walls towards the east, opening up to the west with explosions of dynamic form, individual components merging together into a coherent architectural composition. At ground, first and second floor level, decks and staircases project out like fingers exploring the cultured formal landscape around the edges of the site, an interface between public and private life. The architectural response to its context enhances the life and institutions of this urban landscape.

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