Bildungszentrum Pregarten
The original plan was simply to renovate the school—but after extensive consultations the municipality decided instead to build a modern new facility. Despite tight budgetary constraints, the participatory project achieves a sense of generosity through carefully placed courtyards, openings, and vistas.
Pregarten, one of the oldest market towns in Upper Austria, is a school town with a growing population. Rather than renovating the existing buildings, the municipality sought external advice and opted for a near-complete rebuild. In a participatory process with the school and parent association, which also successfully navigated the merger of two former middle schools, and in close coordination with the province and municipality, a spatial-pedagogical catalogue of qualities was developed. This went beyond the quantitative spatial program and became a guiding framework for the architecture competition.
The result is the first cluster school in Upper Austria. The new building replaces the outdated classroom wings; the gymnasium, indoor swimming pool, and polytechnic school workshops were kept intact. The axis along which these existing facilities are arranged is continued in the new structure as a two-story circulation area accessing the three cluster blocks. These are designed a bit like pavilions, with interior courtyards to bring in daylight. The marketplaces face this bright central spine, while the classrooms look outwards to the surrounding landscape. There are three clusters on the first upper floor, and two more on the ground floor, along with a school and city library with its own entrance.
Three cluster blocks with three courtyards: This could easily have become schematic. But here, no two courtyards are the same. One opens at ground level to the outside and to a sheltered terrace upstairs, another brings daylight into the atrium via a two-story glazed wall, and the third terminates above the first floor, making room for the library below. Together, the three form a U-shaped entrance courtyard.
Structurally, the building consists of slender reinforced-concrete columns and wide-spanning hollow-core floor slabs. Wooden window frames with exterior shading, oiled wood floors in the classrooms, and natural stone flooring along the corridors create an atmosphere buoyed by quality materials. A point of criticism is the lack of visual connection between classrooms and the marketplaces within the clusters. Nevertheless, team cohesion appears to work well—so well, according to the new principal, that she worries that her school could fragment into “small schools.”
[ Pregarten Middle School, Polytechnic School, City Library, and Adult Education Center ] Architecture: Karl und Bremhorst Architekten ZT GmbH. Client: Stadtgemeinde Pregarten, represented by the Verein zur Förderung der Infrastruktur der Stadtgemeinde Pregarten & Co KG and the general contractor joint venture Bildungszentrum Pregarten (Neue Heimat und WSG). Structural engineering: Heintzel Steinbichl & Partner ZT GmbH. Landscape architecture: Christian Müller-Ferschel. Artwork: Lorenz Estermann. Participation process facilitation: ÖISS together with PlanSinn. Procurement procedure: Restricted, single-stage design competition with implementation (above EU threshold). Planning and construction period: 2011–2014. Usable floor area: 9 140 m². Address: Althauser Straße 10, 4230 Pregarten, Upper Austria.