School glaze - secondary school in the 14th district of Vienna, Austria

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1995 by Bella Knopf

Heimut Richter's new secondary school in the 14th district of Vienna combines the programmatic articulation of the Graz group of architects with an understanding of the potential of new forms of glazing to make places fundamentally defined in light. The parti is basically simple. The site is a quite steep south-facing slope. Three ribs of teaching and communal accommodation run up the incline (the outer two contain classrooms, the middle one, common areas: refectory, library, labs, workshops and so on).

These ribs are knitted together at their southern ends by a thin glazed spine of horizontal and vertical circulation. On the south of this are the big sports hall to the east, and the entrance and recreation hall to the west@ between the two is a sheltered recreational terrace.

Externally, the southern end of the building looks like a large blue iceberg that has unexpectedly been washed up on the flank of a Viennese hill. Its almost seamless crystalline smoothness offers little of the delicacy of scale and subtlety of placemaking that we have come to associate with the work of the Graz architects. This end of the building inclines to the amorphous.

But the interiors are some compensation for the featurelessness of the exterior. A bridge leads to the understated entrance in the glass wall, and suddenly the big luminous space of the entrance hall envelops you. At its northern end, the galleries which connect to the tapering corridors in the classroom wings fly across the space, which here is 15m high. Supported on tapering trusses, the glass roof slopes dramatically from this four-storey high apex to the southern end of the space.

The entrance hall is connected to the sports hall by the transverse circulation spine (of which the galleries are a part). Stairs rise to the galleries in the glazed space behind the open recreation area, and there is another sequence of flights overlooking the sports hall. This large volume is dug into the ground to give a total height of 22m. The span is longer than that of the other hall, but the structure is surprisingly minimal.

Long paired steel rafters are trussed with steel rods and propped at their third points with inclined tubular steel struts that spring f rom the spine and rise without support to the base of the trusses. A glazed screen follows the line of the struts, creating a trapezoidal section for the sports hall, and at the same time making an exciting volume for the spine, in which the stairs ascend into a space that expands dramatically as it rises. In the sports hall itself the structure has been kept to an absolute minimum, so the effect is not totally unlike playing in a sunken pitch under the sky, The result, in its simplicity and scale, recalls the nobility of the best of the publicly funded school work of the'50s and '60s.

A new Austrian kind of glazing has been used in the skins of the two halls, It resembles the famous Planar system, except that the stainless steel brackets are fixed only to the inner sheet (of laminated safety glass). The outer sheet (of toughened safety glass) is connected to the inner one at its edges. This is the reason why the exterior seems so precisely crystalline, and why the interior is so uncluttered.

The device of putting what are, in effect, two huge greenhouses facing south as the main public spaces in a secondary school for 600 students is, to say the least, brave. The arrangement is dramatic, energy efficient and it creates a complex interplay between the several departments of the life of the school and that of the city, dramatic views of which are offered from the galleries. But plainly, control of heat gain and ventilation are going to be critical: at worst there could be a torrid climate and a strong pong of adolescents. There is a solar control coating on the outer layer of glass, giving some protection from insolation and glare (and creating the blue of the exterior). Hot air is expelled at the apexes of the sloping glass roofs by an automatically variable ventilation system. Blinds can be lowered to reduce glare and heat gain. But only experience will tell whether the bold gestures in space and light will provide humanly agreeable experiences throughout the year's changing climates.