LIFELONG LEARNING.

A new school for a bleak, former industrial suburb is an object lesson in ecological awareness and community spirit.

Unusually, Peter Hubner and his office plus+ won the IBA Emscher Park [1] competition for a new school at Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck with a written story. It took the form of a hypothetical speech given by Kemal Ozcul on receiving the European Environmental Prize in 2034. Son of poor Turkish immigrants -- they number about 30 per cent of the local population -- his life had been transformed by the new school he had joined in 1994 at the age of 11. Inspired by a teacher obsessed with saving the planet, he witnessed the gradual transformation of the surrounding cornfield site, taking part in the building of classrooms, housing, communal facilities and ecological garden in a collaborative process involving teachers, pupils, the local community and outside professionals. Kemal goes on to study ecology at university then returns to the school as a teacher. He eventually leaves in 2014 to undertake a forest project in Ankara that makes him famous. His story concludes with the announcement that he proposes to donate the prize money to the school because he owes it so much.

Kemal's narrative touches on just about every aspect of an ecological existence, stressing repeatedly that it is not just about building. Hubner accompanied his proposal with a time scale, supplying sketch plans of the annual progression. Not only would staff and pupils be involved -- and inhabitants for the associated housing -- but there could also be many different architects and landscape architects. The place would evolve in response to changing local needs, instead of being fully planned out from the start: indeed a variety of building styles would add to its richness. Once the jury had grasped the implications, they could see how different and radical Hubner's proposal was. Yet it suited the bold educational and cultural intentions of the competition, and once the other judges were convinced (by Lucien Kroll) that it was workable, it was chosen almost unanimously.

Developed around a huge coal mine in the late nineteenth century, Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck is a former industrial suburb in the Ruhr. Housing sprang up for miners and their families, along with churches, schools and other modest social institutions, but it remained a grim place. The prosperity of the 1960s allowed expansion, and German families were replaced by immigrant workers mostly from Turkey. But by the 1980s the mine had become uneconomical and uncompetitive. Its subsequent closure generated rampant unemployment and Bismarck became a problem area. Illiterate in German, its Turkish children had difficulty in escaping the vicious circle of poverty and depredation. The Protestant Church (Evangelische Kirche von Westfalen) sought to ease this problem with a new school.

Fritz Sundermeier, a visionary educationalist who had run schools in Tehran and Tokyo, conceived the idea of a multicultural ecological school as a catalyst for redevelopment. Not only would it welcome people of many faiths -- the Turks are Muslim -- but it would also be a cultural centre promoting ecological education. Sundermeier struggled for support, first of his synod, then of the city and regional authorities, and finally of the Education Ministry. Money was difficult, [2] but financiers were eventually convinced. In 1993, with the further backing of IBA, an invited architectural competition was launched for a school with ecological housing on an adjoining site. [3] The eight teams produced some attractive proposals, but only Hubner's shifted the emphasis so far and so radically towards process.

The new school is developing alongside an existing one built in the 1960s. New classes will move over each year until it reaches its full complement of 1100 pupils. It occupies a former meadow just behind the heart of the suburb, set between the old school and local sports facilities. Conceived as a village, the group of buildings clusters around a central covered street with a kind of public square at the end where you enter it. Toplit and brightly coloured, this is an inspiring and exciting space, the best of its kind that Hubner's has yet produced. The precedents, and to some extent inspiration, are the street-like halls of Scharoun's Marl and Lunen schools both built around 1960 and both within a few miles. In these and Hubner's buildings, the notion of a school is interpreted as a family of rooms rather than a monolithic lump, with a central hall that becomes more street-like through accepting its irregular form from the more positively-shaped elements around it. [4]

At Gelsenkirchen the entrance is flanked to left by the cafeteria and to the right by the library, with music rooms and chapel above. Beyond to the left is the impressive theatre with its large side window and tree-like structure, while to the right, administrative quarters are housed in a relatively banal box. Then come a chemist and cinema, workshop and laboratory, teaching spaces conceived as shops along the street, used by different groups at different times. The complex ends in a court adjoining a radial workshop. This entire public domain is both for pupils and for local people, who can put on plays in the evening, or use the workshops and sports facilities. A large new sports hall has been built to the east of the complex next to existing open-air sports facilities. Though planned in close consultation with the teachers, all these buildings were largely contractor-built, only finishes being completed by the school. Hubner had wanted to hand out the separate buildings to independent architects, but the clients feared such complex patterns of responsibility, so in the end the parts were divided among plus+ members to provoke the desired variations in style.

Classroom blocks are being added as a series of side wings away from this central spine. Their design and construction is more radical, involving teachers and pupils directly. They take the form of free-standing pavilions like terraces of houses, added progressively as classes move over. Initially only two groups of five were built, but two more groups were completed in 2000 and a further two have just been planned. They are being designed by their future inhabitants for Hubner has involved the children in planning, modelling and construction. The architects work up initial proposals based on the children's ideas and after discussion and adjustment of the design, the children build precise models based on the architects' drawings. Further work by the architects takes the designs through the necessary bureaucratic stages and the basic structures are then erected by contractors. Much of the subsequent fitting-out and finishing is done by teachers, pupils and parents.

Hubner has enjoyed the enthusiastic cooperation of the school's director Rainer Winkel. The author of many books on educational theory, he relished the chance to put his progressive ideas into practice. These are based on learning by doing, extending the ideas of Dewey and Montessori, and introducing academic subjects through practical projects. Encouraging pupils to participate in the design and construction of their classrooms reinforces this ethos. Because social problems are so severe, with poverty, broken homes, alcohol and drugs, many children lack a stable background and this must be addressed by the school. Children are therefore assigned to classes which occupy the same classroom-home for six years led by the same teachers who act as surrogate parents. With 30 per cent of children Muslim and 25 per cent Catholic, mutual understanding and tolerance is also a high priority; though the school is based on Christian values, it is open to other faiths and concerned to accommodate them. Beyond its educatio nal aims, the school forms part of the wider community and is usable by local people around the clock. The theatre is equipped for all kinds of productions, lectures, or film evenings, and there is space for a disco in its basement.

Hubner's architecture has long followed a familiar formula: insulated concrete foundations topped by lightweight construction in timber frame, calculated and cut to size by computer. Wood is an easily worked, renewable resource, and as frame and studwork, flexible enough to absorb the varied shapes and sizes suggested by the participative design process. Roofs can be flat or gently angular, protected by a membrane, then covered in soil for growing plants. Walls can be clad in various ways, but usually in timber boarding, with windows inserted as necessary. The addition of thick insulation and judicious use of glazing renders the buildings thermally efficient, and classroom daylighting is usually a more pressing concern than heating, as a roomful of children produces kilowatts of energy.

Natural ventilation is usually sufficient, provided that cross draughts can be created. Larger spaces, such as the theatre and sports hall, require more special treatment. Both have ambitious passive energy systems, advancing concepts which Hubner and his consultants Transsolar have used before. [5] Air is drawn through long underground inlet pipes to be prewarmed in winter and precooled in summer. To create an airflow, both volumes also have thermal chimneys, two on the sports-hall roof and one in the wide end of the school's street which can be opened to exhaust it or the theatre. Unheated, and allowed to fluctuate in temperature further than the permanently inhabited rooms, the whole indoor street space is used as a climatic buffer, with cold air arriving at the bottom and warm air escaping through vents at the top. Air movement helps ventilate rooms on either side, sucking in fresh air from the outside and exhausting into the central street. The ecological imperatives of learning by doing apply not only t o the building but also to the landscape. Landscape architect Christof Harms has developed a concept involving the children and their teachers which is even more open-ended than the classroom design. Part of their education will be to create gardens of vegetables, herbs or flowers, to develop small fruit orchards, to collect water from the roofs, to keep small animals and encourage butterflies and bees. Like the buildings, the garden is conceived as an evolving entity, growing and responding through the efforts of the children. Harms had to decide the approximate layout, the hard landscape, the division of areas with fences and hedges, and the placing of large long-lived trees, but his landscape concept is otherwise open-ended, dynamic and interactive. It is the exact opposite of the well-manicured unchanging park miraculously restored each day by unseen servants, which for many is the assumed gardening ideal. Children need to understand the landscape as a product of human endeavour, of our interaction and di alogue with nature. In seeing the results of their efforts to manipulate and control it, they discover their power to influence the world.

(1.) Internationale Bauaustellung, a national initiative to promote architecture in a particular area founded in 1990, following the model of 1980s Berlin. For another IBA Emscher Park project see AR April 1998, pp46-50 (housing by Szyszkowitz-Kowalski).

(2.) The church provided the initial resources and the school then had to borrow the rest, before reclaiming it from the state, which finally covered the bulk of the costs. After winning the competition, Hubner had to work to a reduced budget, and a state guarantee was sought against excessive costs.

(3.) The housing component includes 28 self-build houses and a 72 house solar estate, the first in the Ruhr area. This part of the project is not covered here because the school is already so large and complex.

(4.) For the Scharoun schools see Hans Scharoun, Peter Blundell Jones, Phaidon, London, 1995.

(5.) See for example the sports hall at the Odenwald school (AF July 1998) and the school at Cologne (AR February 1999).