SEE-THROUGH SCHOOL.

A little Austrian school in which economical planning is enclosed within an elegant climate-modifying skin.

Vorarlberg, on the western edge of Austria, is the country's smallest province, and after Vienna, the most densely populated. Historically, the region embodies a strong rural identity, evident in its landscape, its vernacular architecture and a continuing tradition of building in wood. Yet more recently it has experienced intensive industrialization, with a consequent suburbanizing of the countryside.

Roughly halfway down Vorarlberg's upper Rhine valley lies the town of Mader, on the Swiss-Austrian border. The town has been the subject of modest urban initiatives to create public squares and buildings. As part of this programme, the Austrian partnership of Baumschlager & Eberle were asked to design a secondary school incorporating principles of ecological responsiveness. The school joins a social centre by the same practice completed in 1995. Typical of an emerging younger generation of Austrian and German speaking Swiss architects, Baumschlager & Eberle's work is distinguished by a precise and sober tectonic spirit. Underpinned by a concern for materials and construction, the partnership seeks to reinterpret traditional regional forms and archetypes.

The new school consists of a main classroom block and gymnasium, which is partially sunk underground to mitigate its mass. The gym reads as two horizontal bands of raw concrete and glass wrapped around a low-slung box. A thin concrete canopy cantilevered over the entrance forms the sole articulation in an otherwise inscrutable external skin. The clear glazing admits generous daylight into the main gym hall below, transforming the huge space into a welcoming, luminous cavern.

On the north side of the gym lies the main four-storey classroom block, a crisp cube clad in a shimmering transparent glass membrane. An outer layer of vertical glass fins acts like a rain screen, protecting an internal skin of glass and walnut panels with openable lights. In between is a 600mm ventilated cavity. Held in place by slim stainless-steel point fixings, the glass fins of the outer layer overlap slightly like transparent fish scales (similar to the stair of Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus in Bregenz, AR December 1997). From a distance, the elevations read as bold, geometric interplays between glass and wood. On hot days, white roller blinds in the interstitial cavity are employed to diffuse heat and glare.

Based on a 27m square floorplate, the plan is the essence of simplicity and economy. On each level, seven cellular classrooms form a perimeter ring around a generous internal court that acts as a breakout and circulation space. Light is brought into the deep plan through a narrow glazed shaft running vertically through the building, and by strips of clerestory glazing on partition walls separating the classrooms from the internal court. Throughout the building there is a palpable sense of care and refinement in the way things fit together and the choice of materials. Such elegant economy induces the building to transcend both its modest programme and unremarkable context.