Description

European Schools are educational institutions set up by the EU in the Member States for the children of staff working in EU institutions. In Germany, there are European Schools in Frankfurt am Main, Karlsruhe and Munich. In Munich, pupil numbers had increased to a point where the existing school in Neuperlach became too small. A competition for a new school for primary school classes on a new site a few kilometres away in the Fasangarten district was announced in 2012 and won by the Berlin architects léonwohlhage together with Atelier Loidl as landscape architects. The site extends north of the Fasangarten S‑Bahn station along the S‑Bahn line to Holzkirchen, and an additional goal of the competition was to give definition to the urban situation to the west of the S‑Bahn station. The architects proposed a small neighbourhood square with the main school building to the north, the sports hall to the west and residential and business complex to the south.

The new primary school building is of a scale much larger than the unassuming primary schools one usually thinks of. Designed for 1400 children, the new structure strikes a balance between providing clarity and definition at an urban scale – it is almost 200 metres long – and maintaining a scale appropriate to its young users. Rather than trying to conceal its true size, the architects developed an elongated structure that bends several times so that one typically sees only a portion of the façade and not the entire length of the building (which is only visible from afar). The building is divided into five distinct “houses” separated by four courtyards, each of which has its own entrance from the schoolyard. A long meandering foyer runs the length of the west elevation on the ground floor, connecting the five houses, and long corridors run along on the east side of the building on the upper floors. The interior likewise employs similar principles to break down its scale: the classrooms have niches in different colours, as do the entrances in the foyer and corridors, and the bends in the building mean that one only ever sees part of the foyers and corridors and not their entire length.

Originally published in Bauwelt 9.2020, pp. 32-39, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

---