Metropolitan School Berlin

Sauerbruch Hutton

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Standardised GDR building with modern-look loft floors added

The pri­vately run Berlin Met­ro­pol­i­tan School offers chil­dren from all coun­tries living in Berlin every­thing from nurs­ery-school pro­vi­sion to uni­ver­sity en­trance exams. The ar­chi­tects at the Sauer­bruch Hutton prac­tice have given it added space in which to house a library, an au­di­to­rium, new class­rooms and com­mu­nal areas amongst other things with their ex­ten­sion. Their project picks up on several ideas to which minds are cur­rently turning, specif­i­cally those of com­pact­ing cities by adding to the tops of build­ings, which neither leads to any ad­di­tional sealing of land nor in­fringes on ex­ist­ing open spaces in cities and of pre­serv­ing the struc­tural fabric as a matter of eco­log­i­cal ne­ces­sity.

And as well of build­ing with timber both as an en­vi­ron­men­tally sounder al­ter­na­tive to con­crete and given the scope for pre­fab­ri­ca­tion it opens up. Fur­ther­more, the project also ex­em­pli­fies how East Germany’s ar­chi­tec­tural legacy is at long last coming to be ap­pre­ci­ated more and more. The modern, cop­per-en­shrouded loft floors the ar­chi­tects added to the Berlin Met­ro­pol­i­tan School sur­mount a stan­dard “80 Series, Erfurt Type” school build­ing from the GDR’s final years. The school was, however, built to special order, since it was a gift the Rostock build­ing combine pre­sented to Berlin on the oc­ca­sion of her 750th an­niver­sary in 1986.

Rostock im­mor­talised itself with a façade painstak­ingly clad in one-quar­ter bricks that recalls the Nordic clinker-brick style. The struc­ture was divided up into three sep­a­rate units of dif­fer­ing height one of which fronts onto Torstrasse and one onto Lin­ien­strasse in the borough of Berlin-Mitte.

Architecture and object

Photo: Matthias Sauer­bruch, Louise Hutton, Juan Lucas Young
© Claire Laude

“I would ur­gently advise every­one to save old build­ings and struc­tural fabric and pre­serve them for coming gen­er­a­tions. It was the right path for us und we have never re­gret­ted a thing,” is what client and head-mis­tress Silke Friedrich has to say on the con­ver­sion of her school build­ing, about whose qual­i­ties she has no doubts.

“Prefab”, timber and copper

It was planned to raise the ex­ist­ing units by either one or two storeys as a func­tion of their varying heights. A narrow annexe blocks off a pre­vi­ous point of access to the school­yard from Lin­ien­strasse. Its façade aug­ments the brick­work visuals of its period coun­ter­part by el­e­gantly drawing the pat­tern­ing of the copper roof all the way down to the ground. The su­per­im­posed roof runs over all four build­ings. Its asym­met­ri­cal shape slopes down towards the school­yard, ef­fec­tively framing it.

The school’s new cen­tre­piece is a mul­ti­func­tional au­di­to­rium whose im­pres­sive timber load-bear­ing struc­ture graph­i­cally en­cap­su­lates the design en­gi­neer­ing un­der­pin­ning the storeys added. Pre­fab­ri­cated wooden girders with a 52½-foot span yield a space as at­mos­pheric as it is in­spir­ing. This was fa­cil­i­tated by com­bin­ing timber, a tra­di­tional build­ing ma­te­r­ial, with lead­ing-edge tech­nol­ogy. The high degree of pre­fab­ri­ca­tion ad­di­tion­ally enabled the work to be per­formed with the school running.

The ar­chi­tec­ture’s sculp­tural quality is repli­cated in low-pro­file fea­tures such as the handles se­lected. That’s no co­in­ci­dence, either, since the FSB 1230 and FSB 1231 ranges opted for were made by the same company as built the ex­ten­sion. It was the ar­chi­tec­tural duo of Matthias Sauer­bruch and Louisa Hutton, after all, who de­signed the handle with its gently multi-bend grip for FSB. And now it’s opening the doors in the Berlin Met­ro­pol­i­tan School.

Object details

Photos: © Jan Bitter

Location

Metropolitan School Berlin

Lin­ien­straße 122,
10115 Berlin,
Deutsch­land

Anfahrt planen

BESbswy