Description

In the early part of the new millennium, the City of Hamburg hatched its ambitious plans for an Internationale Bauausstellung IBA (International Building Exhibition), held in 2007-2013. The focus of this programme was the residential quarter of Wilhelmsburg, an underdeveloped 35 km² area which was already home to 50,000 people, located on the west side of the Elbe, between the northern and southern branches of the river. What the existing community lacked was a coherent infrastructure of routes and key public buildings, such as schools and adult education centres, which would connect its people to wider city communities and to Hamburg’s cultural richness.

The so-called ‘Metrozones’, one of the key concepts of IBA, offer space for intelligent growth on the edges whilst trying to avoid the dreary, disconnected suburbanisation characteristic of much late 20th century US and UK urban design. Central to IBA is the idea of raising awareness about the environment through its architecture. This was an attempt to show and to teach people about the environment by creating decentralised renewable energy plants which were there on the doorstep for locals to see and comprehend. Like a prominent wind turbine on the horizon, only much more sophisticated in its diversity of power generation, this was to be highly visible, promoting the rhetoric of sustainability awareness, in order for its lessons to cascade down the generations.

The main public buildings within this plan for a ‘Bildungszentrum’ (Education Centre) are a secondary school (age 11-12) with a business centre, a primary school (age 5-10) and an environmental science centre. The secondary schools for pupils aged 13-18 years remained in the existing building. The science centre is to enable an understanding of environmental issues­ from the very outset of the pupil’s education with primary and nursery school children being given the formative opportunity to experience topics such as the fundamental nature of water, energy and air with ‘hands-on’ demonstrations not just by teachers but also by experts from industry. This facility extends and enhances the science curriculum opportunities up into the secondary school, with the addition of various high-tech laboratories feeding off the visual transparency of its integrated power plant (it has glass walls).

The centre of this learning architecture, is the ‘Torhaus’ which acts as the metaphorical gatehouse to knowledge, and the entrance to the new education centre, where the ‘Tor zur Welt’ (Gateway to the World) welcomes the entire community to use its generous facilities. This is much more than a secondary school, which is traditionally a building typology closed off to all but its dedicated school students, thus making for a rather synthetic view of the world, as if mixing with younger or older people is only permitted when they are at home or travelling in the city. Rather it sets out to establish an openness to all the people it serves, engaging with a richly mixed community of all age ranges; ultimately this reflects the realities of the modern world, where learning can and should take place anywhere.

In order for this open-access approach to work safely and efficiently, the school has a number of different zones or departments within the framework of its singular character. The main entrance on school days is via the courtyard or ‘Ankerplatz’ whose enclosing wings of accommodation on either side present three different entrance thresholds. The Foyer or ‘Torhaus’ comprises the restaurant and auditorium, a type of community theatre which is used for a broad range of events throughout the year; there is an entrance to the school’s academic wing, which is in turn stratified into various departmental zones such as art, music and science faculties, and finally there is the main school entrance itself with a large foyer and information point, which is full of public events, exhibitions and a busy café. This in turn gives onto the sports hall, again a self-contained faculty which is particularly popular with older residents during the evenings and weekends. There is a duality about this institution: it is one institution, however, it is also a number of separate entities depending on the time of day.

This attitude is clearly expressed in the building’s architecture, which is efficient but loose, with skewed angles in plan almost everywhere and a building form which appears to wrap itself seductively around the existing residential blocks that surround the site. The disparate angles of the various levels of accommodation laid whimsically one on top of the other snake inside and out, to create enclosed courtyards and rooftop terraces of great spatial quality. Almost every interior space is also informed by this unusual geometry (except for the sports halls which must for obvious reasons be conventionally formed of rectangular spaces). Thus corridors and classrooms take advantage of the slightly disconcerting effects of the skewed grid. It is systematic yet willfully eccentric at the same time, a quixotic mix.

The business centre also extends the radical dimensions of the curriculum to provide career orientation and pupil preparation for vocational training courses, developing university and work-related educational methodologies. School children will be able to set up their own companies, develop products and services­ ready for the market with the help of real business partners. Regular work placements with local companies and similar study times at Hamburg’s various universities and technical colleges will promote the idea of learning for a tangible future. In every sense this is Wilhelmburg’s gateway to the future, a gift which is rich in opportunities for all members of the community.

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