Behnisch in Ohringen - school in Ohringen, Germany

Architectural Review, The, April, 1995 by Peter Blundell Jones

This school, like the one in Frankfurt, is near a motorway and has adopted protective tactics to establish territory and presence.

Ohringen is a small town near Heilbronn, an Autobahn-hour or so north of Stuttgart. The new school is not a secondary school like that in Frankfurt, but a Kaufmannische Schule, providing specialised education in business studies and economics for teenagers, like our former technical colleges. It was again the outcome of an architectural competition, and again the site strategy is the leading idea.

The site lies on the edge of the town in the valley of the river Ohrn next to an elevated section of the Heilbronn-Nuremberg motorway. Although this must once have been a pretty rural spot, it has suffered the usual kind of edge-city sporadic development. On one side stand dull rows of suburban pitched roof houses, on the other, the typically incoherent mixture of drive-in commercial premises - motor dealerships, garden centres, furniture warehouses and the like - that tend to spring up between towns and motorway intersections, each with its selfish utilitarian logic and loud declamatory style. The space for the new school could scarcely have been more generous, but it immediately invoked the responsibility that the school should make some visual impact. The building needed not just to take possession of its own site, but to provide a landmark, to generate some coherence in the neighbourhood.

This was the main reason for the great ring raised on stilts. It gives the appearance of a very large building, yet is incomplete and encloses a large area of site space. It traverses a ground level change of about one floor, which is carefully manipulated - as often in late Behnisch buildings - to reduce the apparent scale of the complex on the north side, and to bring the landscape into its heart. As with the first radial Behnisch school at Oppelsbohm, the extroverted classrooms get slightly different views and orientations, while the introverted corridors bring pupils together as a community in the central space. However, with the enormous radius at Ohringen they only see each other across this space. To meet, they must walk around the inner passage to a triangular hall by the main entrance, within the south side of the ring. This hall, enclosing the main staircase, is both foyer and place of assembly. Fully glazed onto the inner circle, it remains part of the general space embraced by the ring. Its sloping roof defers to the higher form of the ring, running down towards the centre. It is treated as an added sheltering element, not a positive built solid.

As with the earlier radial schools, the ring contains two floors of normal classrooms, while other parts are given more specialised articulation. At ground level on the east side is a series of rooms built between the columns of the ring and given irregular perimeters to show their non-conformity. These are threshold elements like the porter's office and the pupils' library and cafeteria - food signifies hospitality. Beyond the triangular hall on the first floor, and running out to meet the hill, are administration and staff common room. Close to the centre of activities, they also have a commanding view.

The tongue of elevated land which runs from the north into the space embraced by the school is flanked by two further elements: on the north-east, half buried, a group of science rooms; on the north-west the gymnasium. This is by far the largest and highest room, yet it is not allowed to become externally overbearing. Its corner picks up the edge of the implied circle, and its orientation is almost north-south. As at Frankfurt, entry is at the upper level, allowing spectators to see the whole space at a glance and to find their seats quickly and easily. But unlike Frankfurt, it was unnecessary to bury the bulk of the hall, which is visible at its full scale from the west, with windows to ground level. Manipulation of the site levels allows the whole building to be buried on the east side, which reduces its apparent bulk as well as permitting the seemingly effortless high-level entry. This treatment recalls various earlier Behnisch sports halls, and Ohringen can be seen as a refined replay of an architectural vocabulary which has accumulated over many years.(1) The roof is also a new variation on an earlier theme. It appears flat at first, but viewed in relation to the horizontal inner wall at the north end, it turns out to be pitched, rising from east to west, draining rainwater at the entry end and making its climax over the great west window. Upstanding laminated beams take the east-west span, allowing north-facing glazing to descend from the head of each beam to the roof plane. The rooflights taper as at Frankfurt, again admitting more light to the less generously glazed side.

An established vocabulary

Both new Behnisch schools are impressively finished and detailed showing confident use of a vocabulary elaborated over decades. Everything is light and graceful, with lots of glass, the narrowest possible sections, and subsidiary elements such as structural bracing and sunblinds applied as secondary layers which become ornamental in the sense of Pugin's second principle.(2) The juxtapositions and collisions of the various building-bodies are nicely judged, ends well made and corners cleverly turned. Elaborate games are played in section with the ground plane, reducing bulk where it might become unfortunate, developing outside paths, and tying building to landscape. Both schools give a pleasantly light and airy impression, with delicate structures and soaring roofs. They repay careful study of detail. Many of the interesting contrasts developed between the planes and surfaces of the various building elements reflect the order of construction, making decorative sense of the progress from first to second fix and on to finishes.