Grammar lessons.

St Benno's Gymnasium is a distinguished grammar school in Dresden. It was founded by Augustus the Strong of Saxony in 1709 and shut down by the Nazis, and it remained closed under the Communists, to whom its ethos was too elitist and associated with the church. But, in 1991, with the fall of the eastern regime, the Bishop of Dresden-Meissen seized the opportunity of starting again.

It now has 720 students and a new building, quite close to the historic centre of the city, about a kilometre from the Hofkirche and the Zwinger. The area is largely defined by slabs of five- and six-storey housing built to replace the city that was destroyed in war-time bombing decent enough in themselves but stolid in execution and monotonously planned.

A site was miraculously found in the middle of all this dreariness. It had perhaps been left because it was very difficult to build on almost a caricature of the worst site that there could possibly be for a large school. Stretching north-south along the busy Guntzstrasse Ring to the east it is no more than 70 metres wide. To the west, it faces two of the long housing blocks across the inner suburban Pestalozzistrasse. The south end of this site is at the junction of the Ring and another busy road, Pilnitzerstrasse.

The architects' responses to the enormous difficulties of the site and programme were bold. Clearly, the school had to be a connected entity, so it was essential to string the accommodation down the long axis of the plot. To the east, along the busy Ring, there is a wide mandatory set back, which will be planted with trees to reinforce the existing ones and help screen the building from the noise and pollution of traffic. The long straight east wall opens above the ground floor only to allow light into the circulation areas, and at first floor level to illuminate the offices of the administrators and teachers, who have been given individual cells on this side looking out through the trees towards the highway, presumably on the principle that adults are more capable of enduring the distractions and unpleasantness of the road than the pupils (the stratagem echoes the one used by the practice in a somewhat similar condition at Frankfurt, AR April 1995, p24). The general classrooms themselves are perforce on upper floors, and had the west front been as flat and plane as the east one, they would have ended up looking point blank into the windows of the flats across Pestalozzistrasse. Hence, the classrooms have been broken up into three banks of four on the two upper floors, and each group is given a slightly different orientation so that it does not look directly over the street. First floor elements do not share exactly the same orientations, and those are different from the ones of the ground floor. This joggling of axes has many spatial benefits. Externally, it provides west-facing terraces at first and second floor levels, and overhangs to shelter intermediate zones between the building and small but relatively contained ground level west-facing open spaces. Internally, the manipulation of axes offers the possibility of creating light-filled public spaces at the knuckles of the plan and so avoids the institutional feeling of a traditional school with long straight corridors.

The entrance is on two levels at the south end of the plan. A small and thickly planted grove of plane trees will distance it from the busy corner, and provide a landmark in Pilnitzerstrasse. The ground floor entrance is withdrawn under an overhang and leads past laboratories down a corridor that rapidly becomes much narrower as it approaches the luminous main foyer. This big and dramatic space rises up through all floors, with the upper ones looking into it from galleries, and the lower two being linked by a grand dog-leg stair. Externally, the steel and glass volume looks as if it has been lashed onto the (relatively) orderly vertebral armature of the building by a disciple of Co-op Himmelb(l)au during a particularly wild night out, but undoubtedly fulfils its intentions: breaking up potential monotony and being the visual and social focus of the whole organism.

The architects regard the first floor as the main entrance level. An external stair carries visitors up from the grove of planes to a generous and welcoming space illuminated from the side by a large window looking through the trees to the east, and by the great glass roof of the four-level foyer in front. As well as the teachers' and administrators' offices, this level contains general pedagogic areas like the library, mediatheque and performance space (which opens through retractable walls to the glass foyer). Stairs against the east wall lead up to the groups of classrooms above. On the third floor, there is a cheerful gazebo which looks east over the trees, and up on the roof is the art room and a terrace which in a way makes sense of the place, with views over the whole city.

But we should return to the ground floor at the base of the great glazed foyer to fully understand the subleties and generosity of the building's organisation. After the big light space, the route narrows again as you move north, to expand towards the welcoming luminance of the cafeteria, which forms the second knuckle in the attenuated plan and opens generously through a glass waft to a small westward-facing court. From the cafeteria, you can look to the right down into the gym, by far the largest space in the complex, which is reached through another contraction then expansion of the path: the repeated use of this device in different ways gives the spaces an animated quality, almost as if the building is flexing and breathing. The gym is a fitting climax to the route, with windows and no top daylight, demonstrating that the usual solution of making internal sports spaces into sealed boxes is a wimp's way out of avoiding glare. Because the gym is sunk in relation to the rest of the complex, and much of the light is provided by artificial sources in the ceiling, windows are above the level that stray, high balls are likely to reach, so you can see out to the trees, and be reminded of the immemorial links between sport and nature. From the pit, you perceive the sky.

The building is colourful. The great east wall is pale blue. The south front is lemon yellow. On the west side, this hue is continued, interwoven with vermilion and a rather sharp green in an apparently random pattern on spandrels, mullions and transoms. These colours are repeated inside, to good effect in creating particular places, but I must confess that I do not like them. They are plainly intended to set the school in dramatic counterpoint to its dreary environs, but they seem to shriek rather than make a dignified riposte.

The colours partly conceal the clarity with which construction responds to the brilliance of plan and section. Each articulation of space is emphasised in a constructional and material move: so much so that the steel structure of the great foyer is allowed to crash somewhat histrionically into the more orthodox body of the building. Mostly, materials are allowed to speak for themselves: concrete balustrades are plainly heavy and cast in situ; depending on their function, brises soleil are clearly either of wood or translucent plastic; steel is exposed as standard sections. Unfortunately, the necessary economical plainness of the metal and glass classroom walls is made jazzy externally by applied colour.

Perhaps it is silly to complain too much about colours. They can always be changed. What matters at St Benno's Gymnasium is that a three-dimensional lattice has been made which offers great scope for individual students trying to find their own identity and their role in society within a reassuring but challenging set of spaces, the character of which is reinforced by the way in which each is built.