Human Hubner: the Steiner system of education offers many lessons to society in general. Peter Hubner crystallizes them.

The Waldorf schools, based on the principles of Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925), have been growing across Germany for the best part of a century and now number around 185. Independently founded, they are run by groups of teachers on an egalitarian basis, and are widely known for their caring approach and concern for allowing each pupil to find his or her place in the world. The curriculum stresses the integration of thought, feeling and will, attempting to overcome the mind/body split and to combine self-realization with a growing sense of personal responsibility. It is specially designed to awaken awareness in stages which follow the natural development of mind and body, and pupils are taught for several years by the same teacher to maintain a family-like relationship.

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The Waldorf schools are anti-elitist in the sense that they aim to develop each pupil according to his or her talents, wherever that may lead, and to maintain the principle that all are of equal worth. Because of the importance of learning by doing, there is a considerable emphasis on arts and crafts and also an active school garden. But perhaps most architecturally visible, every Waldorf school centres on a theatre, a community centre where every pupil can learn to perform some music, a recitation, dance, drama, or the special Steiner practice of eurhythmy. Taking the stage is part of the development of self-confidence and finding a place in society, while gathering to share a performance is an archetypal social act. That the youngest pupil might recite a poem in the morning in the space where an internationally famous musician gives a concert for parents and locals in the evening is quite intentional.

Until 1990, Kirchheim parents keen on the Steiner education sent their children to a Waldorf school in Nurtingen, but for that year too many applications were submitted, and with no possibility of expansion, the decision was made to found a new school in Kirchheim. It began as a single class with one teacher in rented premises, funded by parents, loans and help from the sister institution, and it struggled on adding a new class each year. In Germany such private schools can be state-funded on a pro-pupil basis, but only after gaining registration by running independently for three years.

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In 1994 the little school was established in its own right, and in 1996-97 the decision was made to build, a site being provided at reduced cost by the town, who greeted the initiative with enthusiasm. Peter Hubner was approached because of his successful Morgenstern school at Reutlingen (AR March 1987) which recycled materials from abandoned factory sheds in a highly ingenious way. The school group at Kirchheim at first intended something similar, but Hubner dissuaded them, having found the recycling in the end hardly worth the effort, due to the labour of de-nailing. There were easier ways to get a new school, and with more freedom. He gave a lecture about his work and methods to the staff, parents and school governing body, suggesting at first that they should build a new classroom each year, involving staff and pupils in the execution.

Hubner, his son Olaf and fellow architect Christoph Forster then started work with the pupils of the sixth and seventh classes to determine the ideal classroom. First the pupils made clay models of themselves at 1:10, then models of classroom furniture, then the walls of the classroom and finally the roof. The architects explained the principles of timber structures, the problems of spanning 8m and the limitations of timber sizes, and the children came up with the idea of internal columns, which persisted into the final design. Ambitions grew, and funding was found to create a new building of two storeys, with five classrooms and a slightly larger eurhythmy room. It was completed for the school-year of 1998-99, by when the school's seven classes (some still in rented rooms) encompassed 175 pupils, served by 18 teachers working without a Head.

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The little school

The site is a flat wasteland in an industrial zone on the north side of Kirchheim, bounded by a sloping bank that carries a public footpath. Predicting expansion, the architects placed the small school at the west end of the triangle, making a kind of prow for the whole building group. The triaxial plan gives classrooms daylight on both sides which are entered off a remarkably economical central hall, while stores and lavatories occupy the corners. The greater size of the eurhythmy room, and the placing of main entrance and stair opposite it in plan, produce a dominant east-west axis, the main axis of symmetry. In contrast the hexagonal hall is played up for its centrality, with a hexagonal well to the upper floor and a triangular rooflight above, the exposed roof structure bringing the whole building to a tidy climax. The lower part of the hall can occasionally serve as a stage to the eurhythmy room when the latter is used as a theatre. A four-step drop in floor level gives this stage priority while also extending the height of the largest room. Construction was hybrid, with concrete below and timber above, a logical choice combining economy with fire-protection. The timber roof has a light structure thanks to the inner columns, and the roof is left visible internally, in contrast with the flat ceilings and beams of the floor below. Upper-floor windows are also wider than those of the load-bearing floor beneath, enhancing the sense of a floating roof, and giving some sense of the changing structure despite the continuity of the yellow render.

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The building looks elegant and expensive, but it started without adequate funding. The intention had been to roof the space then fill it in gradually as money allowed, but savings were made by leaving finishings to teachers and parents, and successful fundraising by the school's Baukreis (Building-circle) permitted completion within a year. The architects visited every Tuesday evening to instruct Baukreis members on the next stage of work, often staying until eleven at night. After all the discussions and models constructed with the help of the clients, the project was drawn and refined on computer by Peter Hubner's son Olaf, one of the last students in Enric Miralles's studio at Frankfurt's Stadelschule. It was his first realized building.

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The big school

The completion of the first school gave it a home and made its aspirations visible, encouraging ambitions toward a next stage. Only two years later, a much larger school was planned, again with Hubner's office under the same kind of participative process. With a new class entering every autumn and existing ones moving up each year, the expansion was partly automatic. Thirteen new classes were needed along with further specialized arts and craft rooms, but a key requirement was a larger theatre where the whole enlarged school society could assemble for festivities and performances. The nature of this theatre turned out to be the main bone of contention in the participative process, for two groups arose. One favoured a theatre on the Greek model, while the other wanted a more ambiguous 'market-place' theatre, more of a street or like the Shakespearian Globe. Arguments swung to and fro, and Peter Hubner was unable to break the deadlock. Eventually, he proposed that they create both types, with a stage set in between them. With the number of classrooms required on two levels this turned out to be a plausible solution. The open hall of the market-place makes a good general-purpose space and entrance hall: it also sets a limit on the area of blind corridor that necessarily surrounds the closed Greek theatre.

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It was assumed when planning the first school that an entrance court should be created between it and the later building, the two entrances facing each other across it. Rounded off, and with sheltering colonnades on both sides, this court gives the big school the shape of a grasping hand, its thumb aligned with the straight road and its curling fingers expanding to north into the deepest area of the site. The court dominates the west side of the big school, its main entrance set at the north-west corner, leading past the school cafeteria into the market-place with administration adjacent. With stage doors open, one can see right through the stage area into the Greek theatre beyond. Classrooms are gathered around the periphery on two levels, often glazed to the inside as well as to the external world, so relieving corridor spaces from claustrophobia. As usual with Steiner schools, there was a demand to avoid strict rectangularity, and resulting gentle variations confer on each polygonal room a particular character while allowing advantage to be taken of a corner, an annexe, a step in plan or whatever. Upper classrooms also ring the changes on roof structure, different structural principles having been explored by the architects of Hubner's office in exercises involving the pupils. An art-room extends the building to second floor level over the stage area, giving a suitable climax to the whole but also allowing more height to the passive vent stacks placed on either side of the stage--a typical Hubner ecological measure. The triple rooms of the central auditorium can be used together or separately by closing the doors to either side of the stage area, allowing a very large social space for large occasions if it is all open at once.

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Again, there was an intention to work in stages; and again it was abandoned when more funds were obtained. Teachers and parents joined in for the finishing works, some of which are still going on, including floor mosaics, sculptural tiles, stained glass and interior painting with colour washes. Colour is an area in which the Steiner people have their own theories, and it has been coordinated by an elaborate programme. Outside, there is an ambitious landscaping scheme to rediscover the nature of the valley, with playgrounds, sports areas, educational gardens and much ecological planting. The atmosphere is lively and creative, with drawings and craft objects in almost every classroom. The continuing elaboration of the building reveals it as a living, developing place much loved by its users.

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Architect

Peter Hubner

Project architect (big school)

Christoph Forster

Project architect (little school)

Olaf Hubner

Photographs

Peter Blundell Jones 

STEINER SCHOOL, KIRCHHEIM

UNTER TECK, GERMANY

ARCHITECT

PETER HUBNER