Bildungscampus Sonnwendviertel Wien
“It looks like broccoli,” say the children. “A milestone in Austrian educational architecture,” say the experts. Seeming to grow unbounded, the geometry follows clear rules and offers children abundant space to develop.
Architecture is, among other things, applied geometry. The Sonnwendviertel Campus of Education uses geometric principles to bring together kindergarten, primary school, and middle school in one large building for 1 100 children and 170 staff members. These principles draw from an architectural current that emerged during the 1960s, known as Structuralism. Whereas classical architecture gives each element a beginning, middle, and end, structuralist architecture is one of growth and proliferation. The school building in the Sonnwendviertel—a new residential neighborhood on a former railway shunting yard—fits well into this category. The first Vienna campus project looks like a sprawling city hill, with kindergarten, primary school, and middle school using a shared entrance. In detail, the building consists of small, box-shaped units stacked next to and on top of each other according to a specific set of rules. Wherever there is a box on the ground floor, there is a terrace above; conversely, many of the upper-level boxes serve as roofs for the shaded, rain-protected outdoor areas on the ground floor. This makes teaching outdoors possible both upstairs and down. A second rule is that the boxes cluster, most often in groups of four arranged loosely around a shared center. This central zone is an open area where pupils can learn, play, or eat. The walls between this zone and the boxes are glazed with floor-to-ceiling glass and are designed with folding door partitions that allow the boxes and open areas to merge into a single large space when so desired.
This spatial arrangement is often referred to as a cluster, where several classrooms are grouped around a shared center. Such layouts can often result in deep interior zones that are difficult to supply with natural light. Here, this challenge was met with lightwells, some of which extend down to the ground floor. The learning rooms—square floor plans with a generous width of 8.2 meters—each have a small alcove raised on a platform, the so‑called nest, which turns the square into an “L” and can be screened from the main room by a folding wall.
Lightweight furniture allows for quick reconfiguration of the rooms. The same architects also designed the tables with a polygonal geometry that is deliberately less suited to frontal teaching and more to group work. Because the desks are set at standard working height—so teachers can sit with students—chairs with footrests were required for the children, an unconventional solution at the time that has proven practical.
With this project, the City of Vienna’s construction bureaucracy stepped up its game to become a driving force for innovation. The competition brief was based on a catalogue of spatial and pedagogical qualities that was developed by representatives of the responsible municipal departments and the ÖISS (Austrian Institute for School and Sports Facilities). In this catalogue, the basic configuration of a cluster solution with four educational rooms and a shared marketplace at the center was established. Quantitatively, a cap on total usable floor area was specified, within which planning could be carried out relatively freely. Thanks to these spacious market squares, it was possible to dispense with single-purpose rooms for afternoon care. An elegant solution was found to cope with the dozens of pages of detailed regulations for school and kindergarten construction that the City of Vienna had compiled over decades, specifying everything down to classroom sink position: according to the brief, they would apply only insofar as they did not conflict with the quality catalogue.
Of the more than 100 projects submitted to the competition, fewer than a dozen incorporated the ideas of the catalogue. The winning project, however, clearly set the benchmark. In ten years of operation, it has proven itself to be a space that encourages experimentation without overburdening educators.
[ Sonnwendviertel Kindergarten, Primary School, and Middle School, Vienna ] Architecture: PPAG architects ztgmbh. Client: Stadt Wien. Structural engineering: VCE Vienna Consulting Engineers ZT GmbH. Landscape architecture: Karin Standler Landschaftsarchitektur (competition), EGKK Landschaftsarchitektur (revision and realization). Graphic and artistic design: Bleed. Participation process facilitation: ÖISS. Procurement procedure: Open, two-stage design competition with implementation (above EU threshold). Planning and construction period: 2011–2014. Usable floor area: 13 065 m². Address: Gudrunstraße 110, 1100 Vienna.