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

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

Natural ventilation is usually sufficient, provided that cross draughts can be created. Larger spaces, such as the theatre and sports hall, require more special treatment. Both have ambitious passive energy systems, advancing concepts which Hubner and his consultants Transsolar have used before. [5] Air is drawn through long underground inlet pipes to be prewarmed in winter and precooled in summer. To create an airflow, both volumes also have thermal chimneys, two on the sports-hall roof and one in the wide end of the school's street which can be opened to exhaust it or the theatre. Unheated, and allowed to fluctuate in temperature further than the permanently inhabited rooms, the whole indoor street space is used as a climatic buffer, with cold air arriving at the bottom and warm air escaping through vents at the top. Air movement helps ventilate rooms on either side, sucking in fresh air from the outside and exhausting into the central street. The ecological imperatives of learning by doing apply not only t o the building but also to the landscape. Landscape architect Christof Harms has developed a concept involving the children and their teachers which is even more open-ended than the classroom design. Part of their education will be to create gardens of vegetables, herbs or flowers, to develop small fruit orchards, to collect water from the roofs, to keep small animals and encourage butterflies and bees. Like the buildings, the garden is conceived as an evolving entity, growing and responding through the efforts of the children. Harms had to decide the approximate layout, the hard landscape, the division of areas with fences and hedges, and the placing of large long-lived trees, but his landscape concept is otherwise open-ended, dynamic and interactive. It is the exact opposite of the well-manicured unchanging park miraculously restored each day by unseen servants, which for many is the assumed gardening ideal. Children need to understand the landscape as a product of human endeavour, of our interaction and di alogue with nature. In seeing the results of their efforts to manipulate and control it, they discover their power to influence the world.

(1.) Internationale Bauaustellung, a national initiative to promote architecture in a particular area founded in 1990, following the model of 1980s Berlin. For another IBA Emscher Park project see AR April 1998, pp46-50 (housing by Szyszkowitz-Kowalski).

(2.) The church provided the initial resources and the school then had to borrow the rest, before reclaiming it from the state, which finally covered the bulk of the costs. After winning the competition, Hubner had to work to a reduced budget, and a state guarantee was sought against excessive costs.

(3.) The housing component includes 28 self-build houses and a 72 house solar estate, the first in the Ruhr area. This part of the project is not covered here because the school is already so large and complex.

(4.) For the Scharoun schools see Hans Scharoun, Peter Blundell Jones, Phaidon, London, 1995.