Lyrical geometry.

Alluding to organic geometry and primordial building traditions, this little creche in Bremen has a surprising formal and material richness.

With more and more parents working, there is an increasing need for creches to care for infants during the day and young children after primary school hours.(1) Some 10 years ago a limited competition was held for such an institution at Tenever, a poor outer suburb of Bremen. Known for his participative work, Peter Hubner was invited to enter, and rather than producing the conventional preconceived design, won over the jury with an engaging improvised narrative about what might happen. The point was that the building should grow out of a dialogue with the local people for whom the project was intended. It should fulfil their aspirations and might also involve some measure of self-build. Having been awarded the commission, Hubner fulfilled his promise to work with the organizers and parents, developing ideas in dialogue with them. The project evolved fruitfully, but then suffered a series of political and economic delays before finally being realized in 1997.

The site is a tiny park off a side street with a school and sports hall close by. Next to the park entrance is the conical concrete tower of a disused Second World War bunker, which for a time was considered the possible core for the building, but this idea was dropped after discussions with the fire officer. Instead the idea of building around a wall near the edge of the park emerged. It was partly a question of building process, for the wall was conceived initially as the stable armature and service-carrier for a series of lightweight lean-to timber constructions which would be added gradually by self-builders. As a free-standing element, it needed to be curved for stability, and the curve chosen prompted the development of a tadpole-like plan with entrance and social centre in the head. In the developing narrative about the building the serpentine wall doubled as a city-wall and as the remains of an imagined fossil creature - the Urtier.

In the end the self-build idea was dropped, the whole creche being constructed by a single builder on a normal contract, but its life and identity - its driving idea - had emerged out of the discussions between Hubner and his clients. The thick, solid brick wall is visibly the spine of the whole, emerging naked externally in the tail. It contrasts everywhere with the flimsiness of the timber parts that butt up against it, and also sets up the ridge-line of the grass roof.

The combination of radial and linear principles in the plan allows transition between centrality in the head and a route distributing to either side in the tail. The wall runs north-south. On its east side are the main entrance and services, which include lavatories and the kitchen opening on to the central hall. On its west are offices and the four group-rooms which serve as the children's second homes, each run by a separate caret. These rooms radiate from the head end of the building, taking advantage of open views and afternoon sunlight. They are like small fiats, with staircases leading to balconies which can be entered separately on the floor above. The spatial organization presented to a small child could scarcely be simpler: from a distance the building is a kind of mound or crouching creature with very low eaves to bring the scale down. Moving closer, you see the focal communal space, at once foyer and dining hall, through the glass wall and glazed lobby. This is the centre of a child's social world, the gathering space for all. Moving outwards, through the solid protective wall children reach private groups - 'houses' each with their own basin, storeroom and bedroom upstairs. This in turn looks out on the park and play. The building's geometry reinforces the sense of centre and periphery, congregation and dispersal.

The building sits on an insulated concrete raft, with only its serpentine wall and partitions of masonry. All the rest is lightweight timber construction, and it is mostly roof, since the eaves are so low, The centre of the building is not dark for there are many clerestories, which are efficient at gathering light without much heat loss. All this makes good sense ecologically, for the heavy masonry serves both as effective acoustic divider and as heat-store.

Timber, on the other hand, is renewable, relatively low in embodied energy and in itself an insulating material. It provides support for the outer skin in a flexible way, absorbing the complexities of the plan geometry. The roof is a protective coat, thickly insulated and finished in turf, thus extending the greenery of the park. The radial part over the communal hall is supported on a single column with regular struts carrying the main rafters. Illuminated by a rooflight, this structure increases the sense of centre besides acting as a foil to the serpentine wall. It suggests perhaps a subliminal memory of the world-tree or of the holy central post of some prehistoric roundhouse:(2) certainly it gives the children an unmistakable focal point on which to found their architectural understanding. Although born of a line of buildings concerned with participation and self-build, this one was in the end built on a conventional contract. Fears by bureaucrats that the complex geometry would make it expensive proved groundless, for it was built to the normal budget and remarkably well. Hubner speaks of the builder's pride and the way the project became a challenge for him, a fascination and relief from the normal boring and repetitive experience.

Hubner has worked for years at the leading edge of CAD, using programmes that not only operate constantly in three dimensions but also calculate cutting instructions for any individual component. Provided the capacity of the system can take it, the geometry can be as complex and irregular as need be, yet with every point mapped in complete precision within the computer model. There is of course a procedural discipline evident in the plans, in the regular angles of the radial rafters, for example. But there are also numerous small variations which had to be worked through. A three-dimensional computer model helps by keeping the geometry always under control, while allowing it to be examined in different ways and from different angles. In the building process too, it helps to have accurate perspective detail drawings of corners to see the operation of just those junctions that elude plan and section views.

Architect

Peter Hubner, Neckartenzlingen

Photographs

Peter Blundell Jones 

1 The Bremen creche takes some children all day and some after the morning school period, which in Germany starts at 8am to finish before lunch. The creche serves a midday meal. It is partly state supported, charging fees which vary with income.

2 This is not entirely fanciful: the anthropological record is full of house posts with special names and ancestral associations: see for example Pierre Bourdieu chapter The Kabyle House in his book Algeria 1960, or Stephen Hugh-Jones's chapter on the Tukanoan longhouse in About the House edited by Hugh-Jones and Janet Carsten, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1995 (my review AR March 1996, pp96-97). For an introduction to the 'world-tree' see W. R. Lethaby, Architecture Nature and Magic, Duckworth, London 1956.