SCHOOL IN MÖGLINGEN

Project description

Panel by panel, paving stone by paving stone. Rarely does a facade material so convincingly match the paving in outdoor space. But this, precisely, is what a new school building in a small community in southwest Germany achieves with consummate ease: the fibre cement panels used to clad the building match the concrete pavers in the outdoor space in terms of dimensions and colour. Consequently, this school presents itself as a new building designed with the greatest of care, which not only provides more room for pupils and teachers, but also has new common rooms as well as a public library, which was integrated in the two-storey volume to the west. The library faces away from the new schoolyard and can therefore function completely independently, without disturbing the running of the school. A covered colonnade leads to the schoolhouse where the classrooms are located on three storeys. On each floor the spaces are organised around a central open common room, offering the users numerous opportunities for communication with each other. The ensemble is grouped around the new schoolyard which, as it engages the neighbouring buildings, is ideally integrated. Here the architects managed to meet the requirements of the school authorities, while also creating a protected outdoor space. The new building was erected around the old building, as it were, so that the school could continue to operate during the construction work. It was only after completion of the new school that the old schoolhouse was demolished. The result is that the new building defines a generously sized, protected outdoor space that is articulated topographically by external flights of steps and forms a new centre that is permeable and yet also provides a safe space for the pupils.

On the entrance side of the building there is a generous canopy roof and the facade is divided into two parts: while the ground floor has bronze-coloured metal elements, on the upper floor the fibre cement panels begin, which are in different shades of the same colour and were mounted with the vertical joints staggered in each “course”, which emphasises the horizontality of the building.

The building’s elongated form played a decisive role in the design of the facade. Using long, narrow fibre cement panels three metres long by 18.5 cm wide, in three different shades of beige , a sample mounting plan was made so that, from the start, the pattern of the joints could be carefully controlled. The result is an extremely precise facade, worked out in detail down to the smallest corner.

Published in A+D 55, Spring 2021