design and planning for the interior of an engineering office

For Schöne Neue Welt, an engineering office for structural and façade planning (www.snw-ing.de), a customised interior concept was developed for the new location. The frame is provided by a textile zoning concept: coloured and greige curtains structure the rooms subtly and effectively. The entrance areas on either side of the staircase are clad in restrained shades of grey, while the three adjoining meeting rooms are each characterised by their own colour scheme.

A sculptural bar table welcomes visitors in the entrance hall – as a central gesture of greeting. It invites both informal exchanges with guests and internal dialogue and provides space for all employees to gather. Its geometry follows the flow of movement in the room and creates an elegant interplay of volume, cantilevering and load transfer. The flamingo colour lends the piece of furniture additional lightness and presence.

In two smaller meeting rooms – designed for discussions between two or three people or for online meetings – tables at different heights (sitting and standing height) and with warm wooden surfaces form a platform for focussed communication by organically placing the participants in relation to each other and to the screen.

In the central work area, an elongated sideboard provides a sculptural counterpoint to the rhythmic arrangement of the desks. It integrates technical infrastructure, storage space in the form of cupboards and open shelves and transforms into a small bench at one end. At the other end, the furniture builds an upper protrusion into the room – like a small bar – which can be used both as a meeting place while standing and as a reading desk.

All furniture is developed specifically for a particular location, but can easily be reused in other places. They are made from wood or wood-based materials. Both the bar table in the entrance area and the sideboard are coated with a cradle-to-cradle-certified lacquer. The sustainability claim is thus taken into account.

All of the individually designed pieces of furniture are characterised by polygonal geometries that alter their shape as you move through the room: New worlds are created through a change of perspective.

realisation:
- bar table and sideboard: Kathrein Tischlerei und Innenausbau Gmbh, www.tischlerei-kathrein.de
- meeting room tables: Der Raum Tischlerei, www.der-raum.de
- made-to-measure curtains: Unique Factory, www.unique-factory.com, with fabrics from kvadrat

concept for the interior design of an apartment

A concept for a completely new interior design was developed for a traditional flat in the Foners neighbourhood of Palma de Mallorca. The classic division of rooms along a corridor was broken up and instead an elongated, central living and dining area was created, which connects to both terraces and allows light and views across them as well as access to them. The adjoining bedroom, which is also connected to the eastern terrace, is separated from the living area by a sliding glass wall, creating a generous sequence of rooms. The bathroom in turn has an open connection to the bedroom. Curtains provide the desired privacy. A separate guest room with its own bathroom can be accessed from the entrance corridor and is orientated towards an atrium.

The central living space is characterised by a white, sculptural figure that integrates all functions: kitchen and cooking island with extractor bonnet, dining table, sofa landscape as well as direct and indirect lighting. The result is a continuously framed space with a variety of perspectives that creates a contemporary, Mediterranean atmosphere. This atmosphere is supported by the sun-yellow colouring of the surrounding wall, which contrasts with the view of the blue sky over Mallorca. The all-round indirect lighting is complemented by spotlights and a light sculpture.

concept for the restructuring and upgrading of a building ensemble

In the old town centre of a suburb of Karlsruhe, a concept was developed for an artist couple to connect, restructure and upgrade the heterogeneous structure of a small baroque residential building and a studio extension from 2005.

The roofs of the two existing buildings as well as the existing staggered heights of the existing rooms form a very inhomogeneous ensemble that appears both cramped and labyrinthine in use.

By carefully levelling the usage levels and inserting a winter garden on the top floor, this ensemble has been reunited and given a new centrepiece.

The geometry of the winter garden ties in with the respective roof geometries, thus mediating between them and creating a connected whole. The character of the winter garden is also inspired by the classic motif of the studio window. The result is a highly attractive, sheltered space that also connects the attic levels of the residential building and studio. The internal textile sun protection and the generously openable glass surfaces allow the connections to the surroundings to be optimised in terms of light, sunlight and acoustics.

On the upper floor level, the interior spaces are generously opened up to the outside and extended by a terrace in front, creating a spacious living landscape from the currently cramped and angled situation. The terrace also provides protection for the courtyard below and lower access to the studio, while the terrace itself creates a more attractive access situation to the residential building and the main level of the studio.

planning for the conversion of a workshop hall into a spinning studio, design by runne

On the premises of Heidestraße No. 46-52, a detached industrial hall, a former motorbike workshop, has been converted into a spinning studio with an urban indoor cycling concept. Cycle Room Berlin is an extension of CFM CrosssFit Mitte Berlin by Lars Runne, which has been located in a neighbouring hall on the site for years.

Cycle Room Berlin’s hall is two-storey in one part, but single-storey in the larger part over a clear height of 6 metres. Fifteen spinning bikes have been installed in the hall for use as a spinning studio. The rooms on the upper floor serve as back of house. The hall itself is at ground level and has two exits and a sliding gate, each of which leads directly to the outside.

Cycle Room Berlin offers urban rhythm and the pulse of Berlin in one of the last commercial areas in Europa City.

urban development project “new living and working“, with florian krieger, max pasztory, julia schößler

There is no longer any ideological-philosophical frame of reference for urban planning. No scientific-ideological paradigm whose uniform order could be made clear in the mirror of the cityscape. The one observer has departed, the mirror is broken, modernity has lost its way in chaos along with its belief in the feasibility of the world and the self-confident, autonomous subjectivity of its actors. What does it look like, the city in the world without certainties, authoritarian monotheistic truths, the city in the society of subjects without subjectivity, equipped only with the lack of the other and the relics of a past oriented towards the future? Richard Sennet proposes to seek meaning in complexity, to regard difference as wealth, to gain identity in relation to the other and no longer to seek it in flight to God or the gods of modernity (market, power, mobility, science). A new city must give space to this difference.

Genesis from hopelessness

The cities of modern industrial society are at the end of their rope. Social segregation, misery in consumer affluence, traffic that has come to a standstill, rampant crime, ecological collapse, a corrupted public sphere and the total inability of the municipality to act. The city has lost first its quality of life as a place of community and then its viability. But in the midst of its decay, resistance is forming. Islands of counterculture are emerging – hotbeds of the idea of a new city. Diverse groups join forces and discuss the possibility of a new concept of the city, based on the experience of acute urban disaster, but retaining the original qualities that cities displayed in their historical development. They decide to leave the old city and found the new one. The different, partly opposing philosophies of life, orientations and desires should be readable in the structure of the city – its planning should emerge from the discourse of these differences. A planning group is put together from members of this spontaneous founding community – united by nothing more than the will for a new city – who develop their structural concept in discussion with the future users. The difference of the planners reflects the difference of the users – a heterogeneous city structure emerges.

The city of difference

The city cannot and should not cover social contradictions and social conflicts with a formal, supposedly functional, spatial order (grid), not plan homogeneity where heterogeneity and thus unpredictability are ineradicable. It can only offer space in which the plurality and contradictoriness of views, values and ways of life meet; a) in the form of architecturally and urbanistically different forms of development, b) as discourse in public space. In this field of tension of communication/interaction between individuals and groups, consensus and dissent, identity and difference are formed – community emerges. It requires the continuous, place-related, preferably direct exchange of its members in order to define or constantly redefine its structural foundations (norms, values, law, relationship between the general and the particular, individuals and community). This process can be described as the social or urban production of meaning, which in an ideal society or city involves all members and thereby confronts them in political discourse with the situation of the generality of the urban collective and thus relates the individual to the collective (classical models: agora, forum, stoa, … , coffee house, market, square, … ).

The autonomous city

The prerequisite for real interaction is the manageability and relative independence of the collective (30,000 inhabitants, political autonomy, city state?). Political decisions must a) be the result of a discourse involving as many inhabitants as possible and be communicated/delegated as little as possible and b) be enforceable vis-à-vis the outside world or be able to be made independently of societal or global constraints. Only when the questions of place (from technical organisational problems to ethical-philosophical questions: ”How do we want to live?”) result in concrete practice instead of becoming bogged down in mediating and administrative instances, is there a dimension of the political in the sense of the polis as a self-referential system:

- free exchange of opinions

- fundamental discourse on values to determine the communal framework in which individual action takes place.

This is followed by the pragmatic dimension of politics in the form of concrete decisions.

City as lifeworld

Only if the individual experiences the development of his place of residence (his lifeworld) as something he can influence, if he recognises himself in the political processes, is it possible for the individual to identify with the general public, and the potentially opposing spheres of interest reveal points of intersection: The city dweller feels responsible for his city. He recognises the dependence of his individual happiness on the state of the whole, understands his existential dependence on others not as a limit, but as a basic condition for the development of what is called subjectivity. It requires the concrete other as a partner in interaction, on whose friction surface one’s own difference is ignited. The Other forces one to take a position, to be against or for it, in other words to form and express one’s own self. The Other is the dialectical opposite against which oneself develops. Only as a different individual can he give the affirmation of being that everyone needs.

City as a place of mediation / City as a place of identity and consciousness development

Community, society, culture >

Life milieu, language, symbolism, art, work, history >

Consciousness, (linguisticly const.) freedom of choice (relative), negation, identity, non-identity >

Subject >

Interaction, communication, production>

Subject(s), the other, the community >

Security, safety, affirmation …

Home results from the identity of the individual as a member of the community. Thanks to its consciousness, however, the subject can reject this identity, negate it and infiltrate its difference into its relationship to the community (negation — freedom of choice). The interplay of identity with the urban-cultural context and its negation is the condition of the individual’s freedom

Political organisational structure

The aim of the political organisational structure is therefore to minimise homogenising, repressive communality, to dismantle hierarchical and power structures, as well as dependency relationships that stand in the way of the free interaction of self-confident individuals. It is about the appropriation of the place by its inhabitants.

Fragmentation, extreme decentralisation of power, production and administrative structures into smallest, manageable, place-defined units.

1 Residential house, workshop, factory, studio

Discussions, problems, decisions

overarching problems

2 Block of flats, row of flats or residential district, neighbourhood, …

First “political” instance

appoint spokesperson (representative, imperative mandate)

3 Council of neighbourhoods, districts, cooperatives, initiatives (imperative mandate)

form the 2nd political instance of the municipality

Cross-city direct decision-making processes, votes, referendums

Economic structure

The division of the political structure into the smallest locally defined units (immediate neighbourhood, the block of flats, the row, etc.), which can dispose of their living and working space themselves as a small collective, corresponds to the division of the economic structure into self-managed production plots.

- Redistribution – shortening of working time by giving up “useless” work (overproduction, avoiding bureaucratisation through small-scale structures) and redistribution to more people.

- Interlocking of training, education and work, temporary withdrawal from work should be possible.

- Flexibility of the labour market

Direct coupling of living and working in the block / row enables direct control of the production process by its operators living in the same place or nearby. Living and working are confronted in place; their relationship is easier to discuss and consider as an integral sphere of life in which both components are relativized.

The question of the role of work in the living environment, of its meaning and its necessity in relation to one’s own goals in life, suggests itself and can be answered directly by concrete change due to the flexibility of the small-scale, unbureaucratic structures.

Work as a part of being in a place loses its negative connotation as a counter-world of pure necessity. The individual no longer sees himself as a powerless cog in the anonymous production machinery of “society”, but as a creator of his living and working environment.

The centre, the public space, the working space

The appropriation of urban space as self-organised living and working space is contrasted with the appropriation of the centre(s) as a forum for political and cultural discourse. In order to reclaim the centre as a free space of exchange and the city as a living space, it is necessary to detach it from the dominance of economic exchange processes.

Transport concept

“The cities of the future will be planned with ecological concepts that improve environmental conditions, reduce energy consumption and give priority to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport systems.” (Richard Rogers) The main focus of local transport is on trams. The private car no longer exists, but the possibility of car rental and car sharing does.

- Passenger transport:

- Long-distance transport by rail

- Local transport via tram and minibuses with variable routes

- Individual transport via bicycle and taxi

- Freight transport:

- Long-distance transport via inland waterways and rail (factory connection)

- Local transport via tram, bicycle couriers and vans

The tramway

Public passenger and freight transport is predominantly handled by the tram. The tram has a modular design. The space-occupying drive parts are mounted externally around the joints of the train. This creates intermediate modules that have space to pass through without seats. As a result, the floor of the passenger compartment is lowered to 20 cm above street level. Wide doors allow quick passenger changes to increase the cycle time. Maintenance and repair of the engine modules is greatly simplified by placing the technical installations on the sides of the operating modules.

The passenger module is interchangeable with a freight module. The passenger compartment offers sufficient space for the accommodation of bicycles by reducing the number of seats (higher standing room layout allows for greater capacity at peak times). Large gradients (40 %) are handled by an engageable gear wheel. In addition to the passenger, freight and operating module, the driver’s cab is added as a fourth module. In order to allow freight traffic during the day without hindering passenger traffic, there is a siding for the goods train at the stops, as loading and unloading times take longer than passenger boarding and alighting.

The rental factory

The floors of the factory are variable and are rented out as needed. The building’s construction, technology and ancillary rooms are attached to the outside of the transparent façade shell to achieve the highest possible variability and openness. The factory is integrated into the urban space so that even more complex production processes become visible as an urban function. The foreign body attracts attention and thus thematises the relationship of the work taking place in it to its urban environment.

The public square / The gallery as public space

Public squares are places where communal life and order manifested themselves with the first permanent settlements in all cultures. They served a variety of purposes such as trade, council and court of a community, cultural rituals. However, the functions of places, together with the transformation of the concepts of public and private, have changed considerably over time, although the ancient model survives as a pattern in the definitions of public and private in Roman law to this day. Public sphere in antiquity took place in the marketplace, where it was established in conversation, which could also take the form of deliberation and court, and existed as such vis-à-vis the private sphere, which was reserved for birth and death. This model was an essential component in the founding of modern states. In the meantime, the functions of life have become complicated and the definition of the public sphere has also become specialised in all its areas, so that it has long since ceased to find its place in squares. The exchange of opinions takes place via the media, deliberations and court hearings take place in buildings, public festivals no longer have a socio-political function. Markets are rare, they are found in shopping malls and trading takes place on the stock exchange. So public squares are more and more a buffer zone between buildings, where public affairs are discussed, and the four walls behind which the so-called private sphere has entrenched itself. In order to fill squares with life – ”Nor does it want to be seen empty, but completely full of people”(Goethe) – they have to be given a function again. But function is not enough; in southern countries, the square can be used almost regardless of the season, but in our latitudes there are major problems in winter, which is why a climate cover is needed. This protection is provided by a gallery, a roofed public space that offers room for activity, conversation, theatre, exhibition, festival, etc.

Source: Jürgen Habermas – Structural Change of the Public Sphere

The squares

The public urban space is concentrated in a system of squares – not as an ordering structure of the city, but as a reference system of the heterogeneous forms of development and use (“chaos” of working, living, block, row, scattered/strung-out solitaires). They are where public space and working space meet and become perceptible as an integral sphere of life. They are planned, but not mono-functionally defined core points (sub-centres) in the jumble of functions, communities, forms of life.

- Place of nothingness/emptiness

- Square of the Sun (market)

- Tower of the Dead (cemetery)

- Great wasteland/water circle

- Square of information (city newspaper)

- Square of Acceleration (Railway Station)

- Grand Staircase

- City Terrace

At these special places, the existential functions of the city are spatially-symbolically fixed and thematised.

Square of Nothingness / Square of Emptiness

The urban disorder is centred in the void. It is the starting and meeting point of opposites in the urban spatial structure – the zero point of difference. The void is common to all, everything has emerged from it, goes back to it. It is the absolute common denominator of every community. Rebuilt negation of the built (real, determined), in which community and individuality are realised. It offers the ideal refuge precisely from these realisations of community, which are by definition a reduction of the subjective, i.e. the particular, to the general. The community tries to absorb everything and everyone into itself, to grasp it in roles and categories, at the price of the subordination of those who are absorbed. The individual/other/different can take refuge from the appropriating force of the real/determined of his social (built) environment in the indeterminate, non-defined of nothingness, catch his breath in order to shake off the always painful objectification of himself and go on a new journey again. The empty space corresponds to the space that separates one from the other, that makes the same into the other by choosing not-being-identical, non-identity with the real of the other. Goffman defines this space of negation of identity as the “terrain of the self” that each subject must be able to defend in order to assert its subjectivity/difference vis-à-vis the other/community. As an enclosed public space, accessible to no one but the imagination, it has the quality of the ideal type of any public or private open space. This, understood as a space not assigned to a particular use or particular group, but as a meaning-free and thus power-free space that no one can take for themselves, or even enter, becomes the core element of the new city.

Sources: The Forbidden City (Beijing)

Lao Tzu: “The real thing of a space is not walls, but the emptiness they enclose.”

Square of the Sun (Market)

In the middle of the city lies a “power station”. A large solar roof sucks energy from the sky and passes it on to the city. It provides protection from the sun (and rain) while harnessing its power. The market of goods and exchange has its place under it.

Tower of the Dead (cemetery)

In the middle of the city stands a tower, the Tower of the Dead, which spirals further into the sky with each death. The city and death interpenetrate; it is no longer pushed to the periphery of the city/consciousness, but has its special place in the middle of urban events.

The great wasteland

In the middle of the city, one suddenly encounters scrub, bushes, birds and blackberries. Nature, as it was found when the city was founded, is given space here as an island. Encircled and used, but not created by man, it changes with him – a free space for nature and man. In the middle of the wasteland, one comes across a circle of water, a circular section in the green tangle. The symbolic intervention of man shows the presence of water under the city and makes clear his dependence on this “basic” element – culture confronts nature directly.

Place of information (city newspaper)

In contrast to the transmission of information through media that exclude participation in the public sphere and the direct exchange of opinions (television, telephone, fax, etc.) and thus make the availability of information largely irrelevant (Neil Postman), knowledge about what is happening in the city should once again circulate and be passed on at a speed that corresponds to human consciousness. Messages sent in real time lose their significance because they negate spatial separation and make a reaction or, more generally, a relationship between individual and event impossible. Therefore, communication is also staged in a public square to make information visible as an element that structures the city: A large media wall projects the exchange of actualities into the tangible space and no longer pushes information into the hiddenness and powerlessness of the living room.

competition for a multifunctional urban centre in a prefabricated slab housing estate for professor peter baumbach, with urs löffelhardt and frank lang

transformation of the ‘prefabricated slab building typology’ into spaces and typologies for urban density

In a mono-functionally organised residential landscape consisting of 11-storey buildings, a larger empty site offers space for a centre that aims to create improved identification and urbanity. In the search for a significant form for this centre space, we did not choose the vertical dominance set in the empty space, but the “overturned slab”, which as a large form shifted into the horizontal, offers correspondence to the adjacent vertically oriented bodies in its memorable expressiveness.

In the transformation of the slab into a lying body, an interior landscape is formed that ties in with the meandering spatial forms of the green corridor in a differentiated and reduced form, thus ensuring spatial continuity in the whole while remaining closed off from the outside. Through its change of position, the large form has undergone a metamorphosis that makes it porous and permeable: It receives openings and breakthroughs of different order, which correspond with its multifunctional structure of use. Underneath the tilted and broken slab are glass slivers that fragmentarily mark the transition from the surroundings (landscape or terrain modulation) to the architecture (slab), the transition from outside to inside.

While the space bounces off the standing slab or passes it by without any support, so that no differentiated intensity on a human scale emerges, the horizontally floating slab draws the space underneath it. Flowing spaces emerge beneath it that interconnect with the surroundings in a variety of ways. The contrast between the vastness in the residential area and the dense spatial landscape in the centre area with variously shaded transitions from the private to the semi-public to the public is intended to create an attraction that promotes memorability, identification and encounters.

The result is an urban centre that derives its special character from a dense structure and building types with mixed functions. Since density and a mix of functions are essential characteristics of urban living, the desire for urbanity and the specification of a 35% degree of sealing are mutually exclusive. In view of the low density or sealing throughout the residential area, adherence to this specification did not seem desirable to us.

Building areas 1-3 are drawn together into a whole via the outer edges of the building. The two-storey slab sits on top of two transparent storeys. This creates the impression of a closed 3-4-storey structure from whose interior another structure, the multi-storey car park, emerges. The roof is seen as a fifth elevation because it is visible from all sides. Whereas on Siriusstraße the building is closed and thus creates a city edge supporting the space, the 2-storey slab on Schönefelder Chaussee extrudes significantly into space, convex components mark the entrance to the pedestrian zone, concave ones accommodate the pedestrian traffic from the bus stop. The basement on the pedestrian zone is transparent and draws the outside space into the interior. At the end of the building, a slab cut-out provides a harmonious connection to the town square and the adjoining green corridor.

With the aim of equalising the traffic routes, we have layered the paths. Pedestrians are guided across the delivery of the supermarket and the department stores’ and the entrance to the multi-storey car park without any crossings. The backfill on the side of the supermarket avoids residual space and can accommodate excavated material. The first part of the building offers space for retail, hotel and multi-storey car park, which is enclosed in the lower area but remains perceptible as a body. A green zone is inserted between the first building section and the existing consumer market, which also serves as a cross connection for pedestrians. In the third part of the building, a two-storey, transparent building structure under the slab offers space for services and practices. It is interspersed with passages that connect the pedestrian zone and Siriusstrasse. They lead across a small inner square and are lit via openings in the slab. The slab itself contains mainly flats. There are visual relationships between the two areas – spaces that range in character from public to private.

The overall concept is based on a mixture of functions. The optimal integration of the residential building is linked to the function of the basement floors – in our opinion, this makes its integration mandatory. A satisfactory urban solution along Siriusstrasse is also not conceivable without the mass of the housing. In the first section, the park, retail and hotel functions are arranged, in the second section, a link is created behind the shopping centre with a shopping arcade and offices above, and in the third section, services, practices, flats and the community centre are accommodated in mixed building types. The structures are open, so that different functions can be stored and developed, as well as exchanged. All parts of the building are organised to be accessible for the handicapped. On Siriusstraße there are mainly smaller flats suitable for the elderly on two upper floors. Larger flats as maisonettes are planned to the north of the small interior square. In the basement, mainly services and practices are accommodated. However, dense areas can also be used as retail facilities. The problems of lack of privacy that normally arise in high-density apartment buildings are solved by placing the flats on the upper floors. The floor plan geometry ensures that privacy is maintained.

A diversified scenery as a differentiated learning environment

Perception and Development

In perception, even normal perception, only parts of the scenery of reality are actively picked out. In the process of perception or cognition, structures and patterns are scanned in order to filter out the invariables and thus to understand correlations. As learning research and brain research confirm, human beings are motivated by curiosity, the drive to savvy, i.e. the unrelenting desire to learn and understand, because knowledge is fun. Children in particular want to learn, explore and discover.

The design of the learning environment should therefore be about stimulating attention through the formation of differences and irregularities. Differentiation of the learning environment enables individualisation of learning; it makes a variety of offers and creates spaces for movement that promote motor-haptic experience through varied and changing perspectives. Such a learning environment allows children the freedom of movement and leaves them the initiative to make their own choice from the resources offered.

These principles, which correspond to the current state of research, are not new. They go back to the development of reform educational concepts from Comenius to Pestalozzi to Montessori, Freinet or Piaget. The core points of these concepts, in which Montessori and Piaget, for example, agreed, are the development of the human being from the interaction of organism and environment, the self-organisation of the child as a principle of education, the correspondence of changing challenges of the environment with the respective learning phase as well as the child’s own activity as a basis for the development to independence. The latter is considered the educational goal: the development of a psychologically healthy and independent personality that can perceive and use its talents and compensate for its weaknesses.

‚All psychologists agree, by the way, that there is only one way of teaching: to arouse deepest interest and thus lively and lasting attention’. Maria Montessori

School as a scenery for learning

The present design for the ‘Educational Centre for the Sensory Impaired’ in Linz is therefore aimed at creating a stimulating developmental environment, at developmental spaces that leave room for research and discovery and at the same time have the character of a call to action. The planning has been carefully coordinated with the school’s board of directors and teachers’ committee and has been precisely adapted and tailored to the special needs of this specially oriented school.

The design works conceptually with the notion of a backdrop or scenery: The developmental environment with the sensory experiences and materials it contains represents the access to the world and thus the backdrop against which development takes place. The term backdrop or scenery refers to the area, environment or spatial effect in general as well as to the dummy or illusion and, in theatre in particular, to the stage space, the stage set and the stage equipment.

Different settings are conceived as interlocking spaces, as spaces for movement and experience with different characters: as a learning setting, as it were, which allows us to look behind the scenes and to understand that some things are only settings. The attractive location of the site with its wooded slope and urban surroundings forms the basis for a staging of the school in the interplay of forest scenery and urban scenery: The natural terrain, the wooded slope, as a protected space for adventure and play forms the forest backdrop, while the urban, public space with historical elements such as the monastery and cathedral as well as the traffic embodies the city backdrop. The concept of school and outdoor space responds to these existing spaces and reinforces and uses them.

The space of the forest backdrop is led to and into the building: The building opens up to the wooded slope. A sheltered, arena-like area with seating steps is created in the opening, which can be used for performances, for example. This stairs down to the ground floor with a covered open-air area for workshops and continues to the entrance area on the street level. The first floor connects directly to the slope and the second floor is connected via a terrace, so that the space of the forest backdrop extends into the interior of all floors and can be perceived from the common areas.

Towards the urban space, the school itself forms a striking element in the surrounding scenery and projects right up to the street space. The classrooms and special teaching rooms are arranged in a panorama-like manner with corresponding visual references to the surrounding urban space. On the ground floor, there is a gallery that forms a viewing platform above the preserved monastery wall.

Forest façade and city façade

Accordingly, the façades are designed as a forest façade and a city façade: The structure of an abstracted wood grain is printed on the forest façade. The city façade consists of a structure of varying openings and rectangular pixels. The varying openings correspond to the varying offers that the façade makes in the classrooms: the closed areas are equipped from the inside with shelves that are cut out according to the course of the openings. The staggered heights create situations with benches, parapet-high shelves for storing frequently used teaching materials, and window areas that reach down to the floor. On the one hand, this creates a high quality for the interior spaces and, at the same time, a strong sculptural quality and depth effect of the façade, both inside and out. The irregularities in the variation of the openings correspond with the principle of individualisation: as in learning, there is no standardisation and no simple serialisation in the façade.

The pattern of the rectangular pixels, or the distribution of the coloured areas, is developed from a graphic abstraction of the surrounding city panorama projected onto the façade. The mirrored black-and-white panorama was rasterised and reduced to six brightness levels. Three pixels each were averaged into a rectangle and then the brightest and darkest levels were interpreted as colours.

Both facades illustrate the perceptual process of scanning structures in the visual field to extract information. The viewer searches for the underlying principle, which, however, can partly only be discovered in the interior, as the variation of the openings is also explained by the interior qualities. The fact that perception is always a process of active attention and that a limited perception is a different and not a deficient perception can be illustrated here.

The interior spaces

The design intends to keep the rooms outside the classes as large as possible, so that these – beyond their function as corridors – can be used in a variety of ways as communal areas and – at the request of the teachers – can also function as extended classrooms. These rooms have a high quality because the forest backdrop can be perceived from here.

The classrooms (especially of the integration classes) as well as the special education rooms are deliberately designed to be different and not a sequence of similar boxes: These differences can be discovered and experienced and represent a varied offer to perception. Rooms widen and narrow, form niches, corners and angles, edges present themselves differently in perspective.

These configurations also offer functional diversity: they allow different zoning of the rooms for different forms of teaching: In addition to frontal teaching, work is also done with Montessori materials, and lessons also take place as individually supported free work and independent action. Niches and opportunities for retreat are expressly desired. Social learning plays a major role; social behaviour is in the foreground.

Set elements from the theatre such as stage, gallery, podium, platform, ramp, partition, recess or curtain have already been integrated into the planning in a transferred form or can be included in the course of further detailed planning.

The classes for the blind are accommodated in a separate area on the ground floor, as they have their own requirements. The integration classes and classes for the hearing-impaired are distributed over the first and second floors, the first being assigned to the primary school and the second to the secondary school.

Acoustic scenery

The room configurations are also particularly favourable in terms of acoustic effect, as they minimise background noise. This effect is further enhanced by the material furnishings.

Furthermore, possibilities for a perception-related design exist, for example, in the intensification of sound qualities of spaces, such as a transfer of the soundscape from the wooded slope (birds chirping, leaves rustling, etc.) to the entrance and waiting area at street level. Cooperation with artists working in this field would be desirable.

tacti(ca)l/e play

Throughout the centuries, the theory of cognition has associated thinking with the sense of vision and therefore considered this sense to be the superior one. Therefore vision has been promoted as the controlling instrument, dominating the other senses. Because of this the sense of touch with its significance has been consistently neglected. The senses of sight, hearing, smelling and tasting are spatially confined to sense organs in the head. Indeed, in the process of active perception we navigate these organs with our body, gathering information with them. They also work, however, when the body is in a state of motionlessness of the body, like, for instance, while watching a video screen. The sense of touch, however, is distributed over the entire body like a sophisticated space suit with millions of sensors and incorporates the entire nervous system, the muscles, tendons and joints. This means that active touch is not only linked with movement, but also conversely that the sense of touch is incorporated into every sensorimotor process. Active perception is always an explorative movement in space involving the sense of touch. The sense of touch itself is distributed over the entire body and therefore has a spatial dimension, while also taking part in every movement through space. Because of these qualities, it is the sense that most connects us with space.

concept for conversion and extension of an outbuilding to a residence

Originating from the owners’ desire to be outside in nature all year long, the existing annex has been surrounded by a veranda, or rather an adjustable conservatory. This space acts as an intermediate zone or membrane between the interior and exterior. According to the season, this space can be used flexibly, added either to the interior or the exterior. In the warmth of summer, both façades can be opened and the space becomes a veranda and consequently an adapted exterior. In winter it acts as a conservatory.

The design is derived from an abstracted structure and shape reminiscent of grapevines. As freestanding elements they constitute a pergola in the courtyard and in front of the sales rooms. Individual design elements are integrated into the expressive building structure of the conservatory, so that the entire extension gains a poetic character related to the site.

The interior of the existing annex houses the required rooms that have been designed with clearly distinct qualities. For example the living area, characterised by a fireplace, water basin, circumferential bench and inbuilt book shelves, has been lowered two steps and gets its light from side windows. By contrast, the dining area extends to the full height of the building and is lit from above by a skylight.

concept for a multifamily residence in frankfurt/main

This concept for a multifamily residence in Frankfurt/Main maximises the building volume on the site within the legal constraints and allocates four spacious apartments on three levels.

The specific location of the building is celebrated through simple but efficient design tools: The alignment of a rotated centre wall and the southern facades allows for a maximum of light from the south and an optimized view to the city skyline of Frankfurt.

Due to the location on a slope the house and the apartments are accessed from the central level. The access façade is opened along the oblique centre wall so that the staircase is continuously illuminated. On the northern side, conventional window openings are replaced by glass volumes, hence accentuating the building sculpturally and making it even more dynamic.

The interior spaces are structured by spatial islands and sliding elements, hence creating a spatial continuum and allowing for gazes throughout the apartments. Therefore, the apartments appear to be more spacious and ample and the options of use are enhanced. From panorama bath tubs in the living rooms (which, when covered, can be used as seating areas) one can enjoy the spectacular views to the skyline of Frankfurt.