Above the village of Paspels stands a sharply cut, massive concrete cube: the upper school building. It is connected to the old schoolhouse on the other side of the street by an underground passage. Window and door frames are partly recessed into the concrete wall, partly flush on the outside. The design deviates a little from the right angle. On the outside, the irregular geometry is not noticeable – but on the inside, the architect Valerio Olgiati cleverly charges the spatial tension. On the upper floors, he arranged the classrooms in the four corners of the building. In the space in between, they omit a cross-shaped hall that adjoins the outer wall in all directions. Idiosyncratically warped, other spatial figures open up from floor to floor, in which the geometric deviations become excitingly visible and tangible. In contrast to the stony, velvety gray and cool concrete rooms of the corridors, the rooms are lined with larch wood. The panelled rooms appear as warm schoolrooms. Both the relationships between the external, irregular form and the internal spatial geometry as well as the juxtaposition of mural and wooden rooms can be found in old houses in Graubünden, where wooden parlours are built into stone buildings.
Source: Hochparterre
Photos: Gregor Theune
Links:
☛ Report from the mezzanine floor
☛ Report at nextroom.at
☛ Report at Bauphysik online
