BRG Seestadt Wien
A multi-story atrium, a landscaped courtyard, a sequence of terraces: This school offers an impressive spatial repertoire. Meticulously designed down to the smallest detail, it succeeds in being more than the sum of its parts.
Seestadt Aspern is the largest urban development area in Vienna. Once completed, it will provide housing for 25 000 residents and workplaces for 20 000. Seestadt’s urban plan follows a clear logic: The artificial lake that gives the area its name is located in the center, encircled by a ring road, from where building blocks and plots are accessed.
To serve the new district, an appropriate social infrastructure is required—kindergartens, schools, and healthcare facilities. This also includes the new federal secondary school, which opened in 2017. Its building site, like many in Seestadt, is skewed at an oblique angle, an urban planning consequence of the Ringstraße, which runs in an ovoid curve around the center of Seestadt.
The school is built along three edges of the site, while the fourth side opens generously towards the adjacent community park, as if extending its arms to embrace the public space. On closer inspection, these “arms” turn out to be staircases, connecting the terraces to the school garden while also serving as emergency exits. On the street-facing sides, the flanks of the stairs are clad in a translucent plastic membrane that wraps around three façades of the building. When backlit, the steel structure behind the membrane becomes visible, transforming what first appears to be a massive structural element into a lightweight, transparent skin. The fourth façade, with its planted terraces, continues the school garden vertically into the third dimension.
Transparency and lightness also define the interior. Two standard gymnasiums and a gymnastics hall are located in the basement, half sunken into the ground and naturally lit through a side excavation. Above them, a courtyard brings additional daylight and greenery into the school. Parallel to this lies the multi-story assembly hall, animated by free-floating circulation stairs and open learning islands. A timber roof structure with glazing provides generous lighting from above. The lower grades of the school, located on the first upper floor, are organized into four clusters, each consisting of four classrooms and an open learning zone. The upper school grades use a department system, without homerooms but each with a large shared work and leisure area that students can use flexibly. Most of the teaching spaces open directly onto a terrace, which is often nearly as large as inside. Large sliding windows reveal built-in benches usable from both inside and outside—an inviting in-between space, especially during the warmer months.
A particular strength of the school lies in the diversity of its spatial offerings and the fluid transitions that create an atmosphere of openness and dialogue. This openness is made possible by a sprinkler system, an investment partly offset by the more efficient use of space and the elimination of other costly fire protection measures. Although sprinklers are often unpopular in educational buildings due to the maintenance and frequent testing they require, the Seestadt high school demonstrates that such an investment can be well justified.
[ Seestadt Federal Academic Secondary School, Vienna ] Architecture: fasch&fuchs.architekten. Client: BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft m. b. H., on behalf of the Ministry of Education. Structural engineering: Werkraum Ingenieure ZT GmbH. Color concept: Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek. Procurement procedure: Open, single-stage implementation competition with a negotiation procedure. Planning and construction period: 2013–2017. Usable floor area: 9 237 m². Address: Maria-Trapp-Platz 5, 1220 Vienna.