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interpretative model

plans

Liceo femenino de Lunen, plans

analysis

The Girls School in Lünen, Westfalia, was designed in 1956, five years after the project of Darmstadt. The project was developed in different phases between 1956 and 1962. The building was located towards south of Lünen’s historical centre, beyond the city wall that merges with an extensive green area. Near the school, towards north, a Neo-gothic church counterpoints as a vertical milestone against the horizontal, zigzagging mass of Scharoun’s building.

The initial project was planned for a Girls Secondary School with ages ranging from 10 to 18, divided into three groups or grades equivalent to primary, secondary and high school. Scharoun organized the project starting out from a circulation spine running parallel to the old city wall, two detached clusters containing the classrooms for primary and secondary school grew separate from the spine on the ground floor. The classrooms for higher grades are located on the first floor along the main spine. Although the classrooms in Lünen’s project have a more “universal” and flexible structure than the specialized rooms in Darmstadt, Scharoun insisted in the creation of a Klassenwohnung, meaning an identity between the act of thinking and living a space. Each classroom comprised a main teaching area, an annex, an entrance hall and confined outdoors space. In order to make compatible traditional blackboard learning and seminars, he gave the classrooms an extended hexagonal shape that, along with the light furniture, solves both demands. The space was lit by clerestory windows along its whole perimeter and through glass walls facing the adjacent exterior spaces. The connection between classrooms and outer spaces varies depending on grade: more open in lower grades while it turns more closed—almost cloistered—in higher grades. Toilets are located at the end of each cluster’s main hallways.

The school’s Assembly Hall, also used for public meetings, was located next to the main entrance, forming a corner in relation with the street through a pedestrian path. Scharoun had evoked in his “resistance watercolours” a series of spaces suitable for exchange and communal sense, the polygonal and centred shape of the Assembly captured these ideas. The three science galleries, separated by the laboratories, occupied the northern part of the building, on the opposite side of the Assembly. The arts and crafts classrooms were located on the first floor, above the first section of the circulation spine, crowning the western wing containing high school classrooms.
A sheltered meeting area facing south in the ground floor was located between the assembly and the middle grade classrooms, it remained in a lower level than the main circulation’s, getting its shape from a series of independent elements aiming to favour the spontaneous movement of the street or the patio.

(F.A.P.)