Human Hubner: the Steiner system of education offers many lessons to society in general. Peter Hubner crystallizes them

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2004 by Peter Blundell Jones

The Waldorf schools, based on the principles of Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925), have been growing across Germany for the best part of a century and now number around 185. Independently founded, they are run by groups of teachers on an egalitarian basis, and are widely known for their caring approach and concern for allowing each pupil to find his or her place in the world. The curriculum stresses the integration of thought, feeling and will, attempting to overcome the mind/body split and to combine self-realization with a growing sense of personal responsibility. It is specially designed to awaken awareness in stages which follow the natural development of mind and body, and pupils are taught for several years by the same teacher to maintain a family-like relationship.

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The Waldorf schools are anti-elitist in the sense that they aim to develop each pupil according to his or her talents, wherever that may lead, and to maintain the principle that all are of equal worth. Because of the importance of learning by doing, there is a considerable emphasis on arts and crafts and also an active school garden. But perhaps most architecturally visible, every Waldorf school centres on a theatre, a community centre where every pupil can learn to perform some music, a recitation, dance, drama, or the special Steiner practice of eurhythmy. Taking the stage is part of the development of self-confidence and finding a place in society, while gathering to share a performance is an archetypal social act. That the youngest pupil might recite a poem in the morning in the space where an internationally famous musician gives a concert for parents and locals in the evening is quite intentional.

Until 1990, Kirchheim parents keen on the Steiner education sent their children to a Waldorf school in Nurtingen, but for that year too many applications were submitted, and with no possibility of expansion, the decision was made to found a new school in Kirchheim. It began as a single class with one teacher in rented premises, funded by parents, loans and help from the sister institution, and it struggled on adding a new class each year. In Germany such private schools can be state-funded on a pro-pupil basis, but only after gaining registration by running independently for three years.

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In 1994 the little school was established in its own right, and in 1996-97 the decision was made to build, a site being provided at reduced cost by the town, who greeted the initiative with enthusiasm. Peter Hubner was approached because of his successful Morgenstern school at Reutlingen (AR March 1987) which recycled materials from abandoned factory sheds in a highly ingenious way. The school group at Kirchheim at first intended something similar, but Hubner dissuaded them, having found the recycling in the end hardly worth the effort, due to the labour of de-nailing. There were easier ways to get a new school, and with more freedom. He gave a lecture about his work and methods to the staff, parents and school governing body, suggesting at first that they should build a new classroom each year, involving staff and pupils in the execution.

Hubner, his son Olaf and fellow architect Christoph Forster then started work with the pupils of the sixth and seventh classes to determine the ideal classroom. First the pupils made clay models of themselves at 1:10, then models of classroom furniture, then the walls of the classroom and finally the roof. The architects explained the principles of timber structures, the problems of spanning 8m and the limitations of timber sizes, and the children came up with the idea of internal columns, which persisted into the final design. Ambitions grew, and funding was found to create a new building of two storeys, with five classrooms and a slightly larger eurhythmy room. It was completed for the school-year of 1998-99, by when the school's seven classes (some still in rented rooms) encompassed 175 pupils, served by 18 teachers working without a Head.

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The little school

The site is a flat wasteland in an industrial zone on the north side of Kirchheim, bounded by a sloping bank that carries a public footpath. Predicting expansion, the architects placed the small school at the west end of the triangle, making a kind of prow for the whole building group. The triaxial plan gives classrooms daylight on both sides which are entered off a remarkably economical central hall, while stores and lavatories occupy the corners. The greater size of the eurhythmy room, and the placing of main entrance and stair opposite it in plan, produce a dominant east-west axis, the main axis of symmetry. In contrast the hexagonal hall is played up for its centrality, with a hexagonal well to the upper floor and a triangular rooflight above, the exposed roof structure bringing the whole building to a tidy climax. The lower part of the hall can occasionally serve as a stage to the eurhythmy room when the latter is used as a theatre. A four-step drop in floor level gives this stage priority while also extending the height of the largest room. Construction was hybrid, with concrete below and timber above, a logical choice combining economy with fire-protection. The timber roof has a light structure thanks to the inner columns, and the roof is left visible internally, in contrast with the flat ceilings and beams of the floor below. Upper-floor windows are also wider than those of the load-bearing floor beneath, enhancing the sense of a floating roof, and giving some sense of the changing structure despite the continuity of the yellow render.