School Centre Grieskirchen
Marte.Marte Architects – Grieskirchen, Austria
The school complex is situated on a prominent hill above the district capital of Grieskirchen in Upper Austria. Similar to a monastery or fortress, an elongated structure, readable from the outside as a quadrangle and interspersed with inner courtyard structures, occupies this significant urban location.
Clearly delineated from the surrounding landscape, the interior of the complex reveals an urban spatial structure with paths, squares, and an abstract garden. The four types of schools – two secondary schools, a polytechnic school, and a higher technical school – respond to their specific requirements with individual floor plan concepts.
The classrooms offer views of the below city, while communication between them occurs through the courtyards. The autonomous buildings are modeled out of the base, including the centrally located gymnasiums, with the sports field positioned to the north.
Inside, the oak windows are flush with the walls, forming deep niches outward with their wood-clad jambs, creating a visual connection between the classrooms and the corridor. Like display cases, they offer views of the students’ work, enlivening and characterizing the space, which is reduced to a few materials, through changing displays.
Four different formats create a dynamic effect in the seemingly uniform horizontal window bands. Subtly, the black aluminum window frames integrate into the plane of the reinforced concrete skeleton, intertwining the rhythmically accentuated facade structure with the ostensibly homogeneous concrete appearance. Only the three gymnasiums, combined into one structural unit, break this order with their vertically emphasized, two-story windows, setting a structural counterpoint.
