Designs on business: a management school in the Ruhr suggests new visions for the post-industrial world.

Now building outside her native Japan (the much anticipated Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art completes later this year), Kazuyo Sejima's first European project will be the Zollverein School of Management and Design, currently under construction. Founded in 2004, the school is the only research and educational institute of its kind in Europe emphasising the teaching of management and design skills in a practical rather than theoretical way. The project forms part of a masterplan by OMA to redevelop the industrial wastelands and former mines around Essen, in the heart of the Ruhr. The building will occupy a transitional zone between the indeterminate, sprawling fringe of suburbia and the industrial vestiges of a disused coal mine, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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Taking the heroic scale of the neighbouring industrial structures as her cue, Sejima conceives the new school as a dominant, abstract presence that marks the entrance to the redeveloped site. The building is an utterly simple cube, 35m wide, long and high, perforated apparently at random by a series of orthogonal apertures. Drawing on the resources of the region's former industry, pipes integrated within the 300mm thick monolithic concrete wall will use the geothermal heat of the mine water for insulation.

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Long structural spans and varied ceiling heights offer the potential to create many different types of space. Floorplates are virtually column free, interrupted only by a trio of compact circulation cores. Cellular zones for lecture theatres, seminar rooms, offices and so on are demarcated within the basic module of the open plan prairie where students roam freely, studying and socialising. Sejima seems to be waging an admirable war against the banality of the internal corridor; on the third floor, for instance, grids of rooms linked by a perimeter zone of circulation are arranged around intimate external courtyards that bring light into the deep plan.

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In formal terms, there are clear affinities with the practice's earlier projects, especially the House in a Plum Grove and the Funabashi apartments. Here, however, the scale is necessarily notched up several gears and it remains to be seen whether the nuances and subtleties of Sejima's austere domestic work can be successfully translated to a much larger and more complex institutional programme. C.S.