Suburbia undermined: an underground kindergarten near Graz in Styria that protects and cherishes small children, while being a fairy story in itself in its evocation of archetypes.

SCHOOL, HART, STYRIA, AUSTRIA ARCHITECT KONRAD FREY 

In all of us, there lurks a hobbit. We may be embarrassed about the residual Baggins, but the notion of living under a green hill in a cave somehow bathed in sunlight seems deeply embedded in all our psyches, and Konrad Frey has called on it in his little school for small children at Hart near Graz in Styria.

Hart is one of those dull places that, neither suburb nor village, spread across much of the land between cities in Western Europe. All perfectly couth and prosperous, not a blade of grass out of place, but unbelievably boring, with smug detached villas surrounded by little bits of garden that make them seem totally detached from nature.

The kindergarten is quite different. Frey has made the most of a grassy slope, into which he has dug his school. The classrooms face south, seeking the sun. The four spaces open onto little terraces that lead onto a wider green. Above the vaulted little spaces is an undulating hill, where the children can play on grass, and slide down to the lower level on a translucent chute.

Frey's strategy was very simple. He dug the services elements -- lavatories, cloakrooms, stores and so on -- into the back of the hill. A curved corridor and entrance hall links and unites the rooms, and with much ingenuity, Frey has introduced daylight into it, from sky windows and a sort of gentle ditch that captures the north sky. Natural ventilation flows from south windows to north rooflights.

Frey had a good deal of difficulty in persuading the local planning committee (the members of which live in the villas) to accept his subversive, subterranean design. And he had quite a lot of trouble in creating it, because he had to make it on a slender budget, and face the costs of making spaces underground as solid concrete shells. In use, of course, the parti is extremely economical, for the mass of the earth makes it energy conserving, and the school ventilates itself without mechanical means. Excessive insolation is controlled by eyebrows of polyester and extendable fabric blinds, but the big windows accept the heat of the sun in winter.

Frey wanted to show the children a different world to the one familiar from their homes'. His play-caves in the slope' do so with almost archetypal magic.

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Konrad Frey, Graz

Project team

Konrad Frey with Helmut Dominikus

Photographs

Angelo Kaunat