The new building is intended to restructure the existing Kasteneck Primary School site in the Heutingsheim district of Freiberg am Neckar into a forward-looking school campus. This decision offers the opportunity to create a modern school building that can adequately reflect current and future developments in the educational landscape. The aim is to design a building that provides ideal spaces for the intended educational concept and can be flexibly adapted to accommodate future changes to some extent. Our design approach is based on the new typology of a cluster school.
The volume of the new school building is divided into two learning houses, with a connecting building between them. The polygonal shape of the two houses evolves from the positions of the neighbouring buildings. The facetted façade breaks up the volume and sensitively integrates the significantly larger building mass into the surroundings. This creates a scaled transition to the small-scale residential area adjacent to the northwest. The two learning houses are arranged in an L-shape, framing the schoolyard together with the sports hall as an urban counterpart. Unlike the current situation, the schoolyard now opens up to the north, with a view down the slope towards the town centre. The building arrangement allows for the preservation of the chestnut tree and two beech trees, enhancing and maintaining the park-like character of the schoolyard.
Since the school operates on a full-day schedule, the quality of the interior spaces is of utmost importance, especially in the learning studios. Our guiding principle is the “learning landscape”: a spatial structure that is as open as possible and offers better and more diverse utilisation options than conventional school layouts. The two clusters per floor, together with the teachers’ rooms in the connecting building, form a unit. All classrooms face the open learning area, which resembles a marketplace in the centre. The learning studios should be perceived as a place which the pupils of the respective learning group consider their “reference point”.
The new sports hall is connected to the school via the schoolyard for both school and extracurricular use. Pupils and athletes reach the changing rooms at ground level from the entrance via a gallery overlooking the hall. The sports hall is located on the level below, following the topography of the site. On the same level, directly accessible from the staircase, is the gymnastics room for movement and dance, as well as for full-day programmes. The windows of the sports hall and the gymnastics room are designed to prevent views from outside. The sports hall is evenly supplied with natural light entering through large windows facing north. Smaller windows at the roof truss level facing south allow for natural cross-ventilation, ensuring good air quality in the hall.
From the northeast, the open space of the Kasteneck Park flows into the school’s inner courtyard, ending in a sheltered oasis with a variety of possible uses. The new school building and sports hall, together with the topography, form the spatial boundaries for this space. Areas with seating elements for resting, relaxing, meeting and communicating are integrated here, as well as movement-promoting facilities like the climbing island. A large terrace in front of the entrance area and the cafeteria invites children to linger and play. The courtyard is accessed from Charlottenstrasse via a footpath and a stepped area, which is extended with partially greened seating steps, enabling the extension of learning spaces into the open air.
