Lifelong Learning - Peter Hubner 's design for a school at Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Peter Blundell Jones

A new school for a bleak, former industrial suburb is an object lesson in ecological awareness and community spirit.

Unusually, Peter Hubner and his office plus+ won the IBA Emscher Park [1] competition for a new school at Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck with a written story. It took the form of a hypothetical speech given by Kemal Ozcul on receiving the European Environmental Prize in 2034. Son of poor Turkish immigrants -- they number about 30 per cent of the local population -- his life had been transformed by the new school he had joined in 1994 at the age of 11. Inspired by a teacher obsessed with saving the planet, he witnessed the gradual transformation of the surrounding cornfield site, taking part in the building of classrooms, housing, communal facilities and ecological garden in a collaborative process involving teachers, pupils, the local community and outside professionals. Kemal goes on to study ecology at university then returns to the school as a teacher. He eventually leaves in 2014 to undertake a forest project in Ankara that makes him famous. His story concludes with the announcement that he proposes to donate the prize money to the school because he owes it so much.

Kemal's narrative touches on just about every aspect of an ecological existence, stressing repeatedly that it is not just about building. Hubner accompanied his proposal with a time scale, supplying sketch plans of the annual progression. Not only would staff and pupils be involved -- and inhabitants for the associated housing -- but there could also be many different architects and landscape architects. The place would evolve in response to changing local needs, instead of being fully planned out from the start: indeed a variety of building styles would add to its richness. Once the jury had grasped the implications, they could see how different and radical Hubner's proposal was. Yet it suited the bold educational and cultural intentions of the competition, and once the other judges were convinced (by Lucien Kroll) that it was workable, it was chosen almost unanimously.

Developed around a huge coal mine in the late nineteenth century, Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck is a former industrial suburb in the Ruhr. Housing sprang up for miners and their families, along with churches, schools and other modest social institutions, but it remained a grim place. The prosperity of the 1960s allowed expansion, and German families were replaced by immigrant workers mostly from Turkey. But by the 1980s the mine had become uneconomical and uncompetitive. Its subsequent closure generated rampant unemployment and Bismarck became a problem area. Illiterate in German, its Turkish children had difficulty in escaping the vicious circle of poverty and depredation. The Protestant Church (Evangelische Kirche von Westfalen) sought to ease this problem with a new school.

Fritz Sundermeier, a visionary educationalist who had run schools in Tehran and Tokyo, conceived the idea of a multicultural ecological school as a catalyst for redevelopment. Not only would it welcome people of many faiths -- the Turks are Muslim -- but it would also be a cultural centre promoting ecological education. Sundermeier struggled for support, first of his synod, then of the city and regional authorities, and finally of the Education Ministry. Money was difficult, [2] but financiers were eventually convinced. In 1993, with the further backing of IBA, an invited architectural competition was launched for a school with ecological housing on an adjoining site. [3] The eight teams produced some attractive proposals, but only Hubner's shifted the emphasis so far and so radically towards process.

The new school is developing alongside an existing one built in the 1960s. New classes will move over each year until it reaches its full complement of 1100 pupils. It occupies a former meadow just behind the heart of the suburb, set between the old school and local sports facilities. Conceived as a village, the group of buildings clusters around a central covered street with a kind of public square at the end where you enter it. Toplit and brightly coloured, this is an inspiring and exciting space, the best of its kind that Hubner's has yet produced. The precedents, and to some extent inspiration, are the street-like halls of Scharoun's Marl and Lunen schools both built around 1960 and both within a few miles. In these and Hubner's buildings, the notion of a school is interpreted as a family of rooms rather than a monolithic lump, with a central hall that becomes more street-like through accepting its irregular form from the more positively-shaped elements around it. [4]

At Gelsenkirchen the entrance is flanked to left by the cafeteria and to the right by the library, with music rooms and chapel above. Beyond to the left is the impressive theatre with its large side window and tree-like structure, while to the right, administrative quarters are housed in a relatively banal box. Then come a chemist and cinema, workshop and laboratory, teaching spaces conceived as shops along the street, used by different groups at different times. The complex ends in a court adjoining a radial workshop. This entire public domain is both for pupils and for local people, who can put on plays in the evening, or use the workshops and sports facilities. A large new sports hall has been built to the east of the complex next to existing open-air sports facilities. Though planned in close consultation with the teachers, all these buildings were largely contractor-built, only finishes being completed by the school. Hubner had wanted to hand out the separate buildings to independent architects, but the clients feared such complex patterns of responsibility, so in the end the parts were divided among plus+ members to provoke the desired variations in style.