Vienna, Austria
Viennese architectural team fasch&fuchs and landscape architects pflanz! garten&freiraum create a learning community building that would promote individual encouragement, work in different group sizes, self-organized and open learning, and project-based lessons.
The project has been awarded a 2021 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
In terms of organization, it is planned to implement a system of clusters for the lower secondary stage in which four classrooms share an open learning area.
The upper secondary stage has a department system comprising the three departments of Languages, Science, and Business/IT, accompanied by four main “home bases.”
The team had a site in Seestadt Aspern at their disposal for this project that adjoins a district park—the Hannah-Arendt-Park—on one side and a small urban square on the other. The site, like many others in Seestadt Aspern, has oblique angles.
The architects embraced the site as-is and built their house up to the site boundary on three sides.
On the fourth side, it spreads its arms out to the district park, from where it has the appearance of an airy glasshouse with terraces and a green space rolled out in front.
The two arms of the school are stairs that connect all terraces with the school garden and also serve as evacuation routes.
The sides of these stairs facing onto the road are lined with a plastic membrane that runs around the entire building on three sides.
When light from the back, the load-bearing steel structure behind the membrane becomes visible and what appears at first to be a solid structural element suddenly turns out to be a light, transparent covering.
Transparency and lightness are the guiding principles inside the school too.
The depth of the building enables a nicely proportioned courtyard that brings additional light and green into the school.
Parallel to this is a multi-story hall with steps and open learning islands. Light is afforded from above by a sawtooth roof with a load-bearing structure of timber.
There are only a few schools in Austria that achieve such a relaxed atmosphere as this one.
In all of these projects, the architects demonstrate their skill in deriving form from the structural logic architectural principles that became the epitome of the high-tech style thirty years ago: lightness and transparency, membranes instead of walls, form derived from structure.
The architects count among that small group of architects who have cultivated this style to the point where it does not pushily make itself the center of attention but instead appears to be the most natural thing in the world.
The facade looking onto the park, with its system of suspended walkways, steel frames, and lightweight bridges of reinforced concrete, is an artwork in its own right.
Project: Federal School Aspern
Architects: fasch&fuchs.ZT-GmbH
Client: Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research
General Contractor: BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaftmbh
Landscape Architects: pflanz! garten&freiraum og
Photographers: Hertha Hurnaus and Paul Ott
