The school is part of the conversion of a barracks site in Ostfildern, near Stuttgart. The grounds were owned by the American forces into the 1990s and hence not accessible to the public. An urban design competition underpinned the transformation into a new city district. The winning design came from the architects Janson + Wolfrum. It envisages a symbiosis of one part of the existing structures, the access to them and the overlay of new building sites, streets and squares.

The school forms the city boundary to the northeast and was the subject of a competition of its own. The programme for the two-stage development comprises secondary and primary schools as well as a triple gymnasium with the necessary outdoor spaces.

In our design the sports hall has a slightly curved wall and urbanistically completes the first construction phase. It is at the lower level of the site, which slopes down one floor level to the south. Its roof surface accommodates games areas. Skylights made of glass blocks configure the roof structure. The ventilation flues were treated as a sculptural element and constructed of masonry like the building’s façades.

The school building proper develops linearly along the west side, following the old layout of the streets. In between, the schoolyard has space for people to circulate freely. Landscaped steps with planting offer a view of the surrounding area and connect the upper part of the schoolyard with the city promenade running perpendicular in front of the site.

The spatial concept of the school building corresponds to the basic urban planning concept of the rectangular street pattern. The neighbouring residential buildings provided the scale for the two following phases of construction. The streets running east to west lead directly to the entrances. The southern building conforms to the site and has three storeys at its southern end and two towards the north. The second phase of construction – for the primary school – follows the same ground plan schema and is connected to the secondary school by a bridge.

The building’s exterior consists of Hoffmann kiln bricks, whose relatively coarse surface and changing colours combine with the rough masonry joints to convey the impression of something constructed imprecisely, something long-established and yet new all the same. With that, we were questioning whether a new building must absolutely appear novel and avoiding the expectation that architecture has to set a sign of the times in the way it looks. In this location it was anyway a matter of lending a demeanour bespeaking continuity to what is still a young city, which is something that can come off really well with materials that become more attractive with age.

The ‘interior street’ of the school building incorporates single-flight stairs in the middle. People enter the building via a vestibule – a small, relatively dark room – which makes the space that follows seem that much bigger. A very bright skylight covers the length of the circulation space and points the way to the upper floors. The façade’s masonry is continued in the ‘interior street’. Approaching the entrances to the classrooms, the materials become finer: here we were able to furnish the recessed surfaces with dark blue tiles by Alvar Aalto.

Client:
SEG Sanierungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft
Ostfildern mbH, Ostfildern

Architects:
Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei, Stuttgart

Team:
Eva Caspar (Projektleitung), Judith Haas, Alexander Mayer-Steudte, Ulrike Hautau, Cornelia Hund, Pia Elser, Marco Garcia-Barth, Volker Hahn, Markus Horn, Tanja Pfahler, Annette Strauss, Daniel Trepte, Eva Wanner

Structural Engineering:
Ingenieurbüro Müller + Müller, Ostfildern

Competition:
1996 – 1st prize

Construction period:
1996 – 1999 (First construction phase)
2000 – 2002 (Second construction phase)

Location:
Gerhard-Koch-Straße 6, 73760 Ostfildern, Germany

Awards
Auszeichnung Beispielhaftes Bauen 2001
Architektenkammer Baden-Württemberg

Auszeichnung Deutscher Architekturpreis 2001
Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung

Nominierung zur Teilnahme am Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2001
Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona

Auszeichnung guter Bauten, BDA 2002

Hugo-Häring-Preis, BDA 2002

Beitrag für den Deutschen Pavillon der Architektur-Biennale in Venedig 2004

Publications
dom publishers (Hg.):
Architekturführer Stuttgart
12|2018

Zukunftsfähiger Schulbau – 12 Schulen im Vergleich
Edition Detail, 2017

Lederer, Arno / Ragnarsdóttir, Jórunn / Oei, Marc (Hg.):
Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei 1
Jovis Verlag Berlin 2012

Falk Jaeger (Hg.):
Lederer+Ragnarsdóttir+Oei
Berlin 2008

L’architecture d’aujourd’hui
362 | 2006

Das Bauzentrum Baukultur
8 | 2005

Carola Franke-Höltzermann (Hg.):
Neues Stuttgart. Stuttgarter Baukultur 1996 – 2006
Berlin 2005

Karl H.C. Ludwig, Hubert Möhrle (Hg.):
Stuttgart. Ein Begleiter zu neuer Landschaftsarchitektur
München 2005

L’architettura naturale
25 | 2004

Casabella
3 | 2004

Spiegel-Special – Lernen fürs Leben
3 | 2004

Adato
2 | 2004

Christoph Mäckler (Hg.):
Werkstoff Stein, Material, Konstruktion. Zeitgenössische Architektur
Berlin 2004

Markus Brodbeck, Darius Ramazani (Hg.):
40 Räume.
Ludwigsburg 2004

Architektur + Wettbewerbe
193 | 2003

Costruire in Laterizio
94 | 2003

Architecture
9 | 2003

Architektura & Biznes
3 | 2003

Deutsche Bauzeitung
12 | 2002

Werner Durth (Hg.):
Architektur in Deutschland. Deutscher Architekturpreis 2001
Stuttgart 2002

Ullrich Schwarz (Hg.):
Neue Deutsche Architektur – Eine Reflexive Moderne
Ostfildern 2002

Anna Meseure, Ingeborg Flagge (hg.):
Architektur Jahrbuch 2001
München 2001

Architecture and Urbanism
373 | 2001

Arquitectura Viva
78 | 2001

Stuttgarter Nachrichten
01.08.2001

Stuttgarter Zeitung
31.05.2001

Archithese
2 | 2001

Deutsche Bauzeitschrift
1 | 2001

Annette Schavan (Hg.):
Schulen in Baden-Württemberg.
Moderne und historische Bauten zwischen Rhein, Neckar und Bodensee
Stuttgart 2001

Institut für Internationale Architektur-Dokumentation (Hg.):
Mauerwerkatlas
München 2001

Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof (Hg.):
Drinnen ist anders als draußen
Baunach 2001

Baumeister
9 | 2000

Galerie Aedes (Hg.):
Drinnen ist anders als draußen
Berlin 2000

Architektur + Wettbewerbe
172 | 1997

Photos
Roland Halbe, Stuttgart