Tyrol, Austria
Viennese architects fasch&fuchs have designed an informal modern learning environment in Neustift, where landscaped green roofs act as playgrounds sloping down to the river and children learn from being outside.
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.
The realization of a future-oriented educational building was perceived and carried out as a joint task by all participants, the clients, the users, and the architects.
The new school campus in Neustift/Stubaital brings together several schools previously scattered across different districts: a secondary school, a ski secondary school with a boarding school, an elementary school and a vocational school, kitchen and dining hall, and a wide range of sports facilities are offered to the students and community residents.
The property spreads out gently sloping from the busy main road to the bend of the river Ruetz.
The neighborhood is characterized by farms and family houses, meadows, and pastures with the characteristic grey tanned haystacks, and an amazing mountain panorama. A landscape that one would like to preserve.
The careful approach to this alpine landscape and the scale in relation to the neighboring rural structure makes the project appear modest yet self-confident.
To protect the existing quality of the open space as much as possible, the school campus is designed as a flat, terraced, walkable green educational carpet, which is accessed by an inner and outer school walkway.
A two-story entrance building protects the green carpet behind it from the noisy street, while the boarding school for sports floats above the terraced grounds at the northwest corner of the property.
These two buildings frame the cascade-like educational carpet.
The ‘indoor campus’ includes a central two-story auditorium, a space for events of all kinds, a meeting point for all students and community members.
A spacious seating arena connects the entrance area to the library, with the music and gyms, which are located one floor below.
The educational units of the elementary school are located on the floor directly above the entrance area.
The educational units of the main school and the ski school are structured in a terraced, comb-like layout.
Three to four classrooms are connected to an open learning zone, a seminar room, a teachers’ room, a cloakroom, and a small toilet unit to form a continuous spatial structure.
The architects chose a radically different path: they built over the entire property with a one-story structure with incised courtyards and only two larger structures at the very end of the property: the floating box of the elementary school at the top of the main street and the boarding school at the bottom, where it portrays self-confidence in the landscape as a small tower.
All of this is connected by an inner street, a kind of backbone to the complex, which follows the fall line of the slope and connects the levels with ramps and stairs.
The school is a miracle of space with many memorable places: an outside staircase that begins broadly in front of the elementary school and leads down over the roofs; open learning zones that receive an extra portion of light from above in the right place; a central hall in the boarding school tower that helps the residents to form a community; and many places more.
The basis for all of this is a sophisticated geometric concept: strictly parallel structures that are shifted against each other by a lateral impulse derived from the site layout.
This shift takes away everything schematic from the ground plan and makes the building with its green roofs and courtyards look like a piece of nature.
Project: Schulcampus Neustift
Architects: fasch&fuchs.ZT-GmbH
Client: Federal School of Neustift
Contractor: Commune Neustift im Stubaital
Photographers: Hertha Hurnaus and Paul Ott
