Scholastic centrality: a delicate and thorough investigation into the nature of learning has allowed the Behnisch practice to produce schools appropriate for a modern democracy.

The invention in the Behnisch office of the polygonal school dates back to 1969 and the school 'In den Berglen' near Oppelsbohm. The round form gave a ring of classrooms with each facing a different direction, some combinable with folding partitions. These opened into a central toplit hall which could be used for assembly. Entered from beneath, the design was compact, promoting a sense of togetherness, and long dreary corridors were avoided.

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This model improved with the next Behnisch school: the Progymnasium on the Schafersfeld in Lorch of 1973. The polygonal upper floor of classrooms around a central hall was added to a radically irregular ground floor made up of specialized departments--sciences, arts and crafts. These articulated the branches of the curriculum and reduced the scale of the whole building, while also making a transition between the purity of the upper ring and the shape of the hillside, acknowledging both orientation and slope. The addition of colourful projecting sunblinds layered the facade pleasingly as well as solving the climatic problem.

The Behnisch office added a sports hall and, ten years later, they were commisioned for a further school on the site, the Hauptschule, similar in overall form and layout but with a triangular top floor and a hall glazed to the north. It showed its kinship with the Progymnasium while taking on a strong identity of its own and advancing the vocabulary of construction and detailing into new realms. Both schools have been highly appreciated by the town and were seen as exemplary in Germany. There has also been a growth in pupil numbers. In the mid '90s, a new wing of six classrooms, delicately slipped into the slope, was added to the Progymnasium, but this did not suffice. Pupil numbers kept growing, and in 1999 the town authorities, in consultation with Behnisch, decided to add a whole new school. The Schafersfeld (shepherd's pasture) is a hillside high above Lorch, just one hill away from Lorch's famous medieval monastery. The whole area is surrounded by woodland. The former schools were placed on the south side overlooking the town, and were approached by a drive from behind. The new school takes its place behind them, enjoying the view of an open meadow to the north and anchored to the edge of a small gully, a careful and dramatic placing. The slope of the site absorbs a whole storey, so science classrooms could be on the lowest level, physics and chemistry incorporated into the slope, while biology projects dramatically on stilts towards a footbridge over the tiny stream. Storage and plant rooms take up the underground spaces.

The main entrance is one storey higher, with the administration, canteen and art and music rooms, again in separate wings partly following those beneath. The irregular glazed entrance hall linking them all centres on a stair and toplit well connecting to the upper floor of classrooms. These are not polygonal as in the earlier Progymnasium, but segments of a circle, 12 in number set at 30 degree intervals. Regular columns support the ring, sometimes extending up two storeys and creating sheltered areas outside the upper and lower entrances. The central hall started as a circle in plan, but became asymmetrical due to the floorwell cut in sympathy with the hall beneath, and because of the ingress of the partition delimiting the computer and earth-science rooms which break the regular classroom pattern. These asymmetries disguise the fact that the main staircase occupies the exact centre of the circle, almost on its north-south axis. The lower stair, a dog-leg set in a void to east, arrives right next to it, but is positioned to pick up the thrust of the corridor opposite at entry and lower levels, the only corridor of any length in the entire building.

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The main architectural lesson is surely the unifying power of the circular form in pulling everything together, allowing its universal theme to stand in opposition to particularities of orientation and landscape played out below. It makes the building so instantly readable in every direction that it no longer matters how disparate subordinate elements are allowed to become: there is really no problem of it becoming chaotic. On the other hand, the lower departments can be fiercely articulated, each with its different character and experience, and this must produce a strong sense of place for the pupils. Relationships with the land are everywhere exploited: the apparent 'plateau' of the entrance, the sudden first-floor outlook of administration at the same level, the even more 'elevated' music room. At the lower level, the east- and north-facing physics and chemistry departments offer views of immediate landscapes, as opposed to the pier-like double-sided experience in biology, looking out and over. All of this contrasts with the wider panorama from the top floor, where each class gets a different view and sun penetration, almost like a sundial.

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The parts embedded in the ground absorb the necessarily lightless rooms and aid thermal stability, but elsewhere life is lived under natural light, with a variety of external and internal sun-shading devices to prevent excess. Far from ruining the purity of the architecture, these blinds and visors are well integrated, adding a kinetic layer to the facade, which creates visible changes in the face of the building for the outside world.

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Perhaps most exceptional in a school of this kind is the quality of the circulation spaces, always daylit, continuously relieved with different views of the outside world, always telling you where you are and suggesting where you might go next. This is one way in which the building scores heavily over some of recent British Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schools, where everything is flooded in the same dingy fluorescent light summer and winter, and blind smelly corridors are automatically double-loaded for economy.

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How will we ever teach our children to live with the climate and not to squander energy when we teach them in such hermetic environments? The problem comes not only of repetitive unimaginative architecture, but also from the standards invented in the 1960s and still enshrined in bureaucratic PFI norms which set a certain temperature and level of light despite our ability to adjust our clothes and our eyes' ability to read under anything from candle light to full sun. Changing conditions inform us of night and day, summer and winter, and we lived for thousands of years in response to them. We know it is destructive of health and well-being to experience conditions that are invariable, yet we carry on with deep plans and heavy servicing based on these mistaken assumptions about presumed conditions of comfort.

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Another virtue of the Behnisch school is the quality of construction and finish, which makes the most of the logic of the assembly process without much embellishment apart from some deftly applied colour, the responsibility of Christian Kandzia. Exposed concrete appears here and there, sometimes painted when its area might seem excessive. Ceilings are of perforated plasterboard, the holes filled to make a solid edge, cheap enough but avoiding the mechanistic grid of suspended ceiling systems and allowing lamps to be sited by choice rather than dictated by a meaningless rhythm. Glazing is managed with the lightest possible mullions despite the sealed units, and painted steel balustrades preserve safety while maintaining maximum transparency. Beech veneers on doors, benches and partitions add a touch of warmth, and there is even the reassurance of solid timber in places. This carefully developed and selected vocabulary is routine for the Behnisch office. It looks expensive, and one has to be reminded that this office has built large numbers of schools for normal prices, and in that regard this one is no exception.

SCHOOL, LORCH, GERMANY

ARCHITECT

BEHNISCH & PARTNER

Architect

Behnisch & Partner, Stuttgart

Project team

Gunter Behnisch, Manfred Sabatke, Dieter Rehm, Cornelia Wust

Structural engineer

Hermann U. Hottmann

Services engineer

Schreiber Ingenieure

Photographs

Peter Blundell Jones