The new building for the Fischbek-Falkenberg primary school takes up the lines of the adjacent assembly hall and the classroom block behind it and thus melds into the urban context. On the street side, the Z-shaped building harmoniously blends into the low and disparate buildings already present and picks up on the structure along the street edge, characterised by projections and recesses. A wide, inviting entrance created between the assembly hall and the new building guides arrivals onto the campus grounds. This gives the school a new, succinct appearance. The special zigzag shape redefines the school yard and provides clear-cut outdoor areas for all users.
The façade’s design is also intended to embed it within the local context – firstly via its materials and colour scheme, secondly by incorporating design features of the existing buildings. With its massive parapet strips made of double-skin brickwork, the façade reiterates a material that is predominantly used on the campus. Window strips designed as wood/aluminium constructions illuminate the rooms optimally with daylight and lend a lightness to the compact cubature. Recesses in the ground floor form attractive entrance areas that provide shelter from the rain.
The new building includes a school library; on the courtyard side, a sports hall projects from the structure. The ground floor of the new building houses a daycare centre – a novelty and a pilot project in Hamburg’s school construction programme. Four daycare rooms and their adjoining rooms are grouped together as a cluster and can be extended to six group rooms if the need arises. There are also communal areas, such as the room where children eat or develop motor skills, which can be repurposed as group rooms if there is growing demand. The daycare centre operates independently, but can be merged with the school to strengthen relationships between different age and user groups and to generate synergies. The daycare centre’s outdoor area is in front of the building and thus separated spatially and visually from the newly built school yard behind it. This provides a protected play area for the youngest children that is all their own.
