Secondary School Tegernseer Tal with Triple Sports Hall, Gmund

The architecture of the secondary school in the Bavarian town of Gmund supports the educational concept of a school offering all-day classes. A flexible interior design ensures suitability for diverse future teaching and learning environments. The narrowness of the plot of land as well as a neighbourhood with small-scale constructions resulted in an ensemble of simple rectangular buildings, composed of a three-storey school and a sports hall divisible into three sections. While the taller school building located near the street is architecturally prominent, the lower sports hall construction – one floor of which is underground – forms a more moderate transition to the open landscape. An interesting spatial sequence presents itself to the students starting from the forecourt and continuing through the assembly hall, inner courtyard and recess area, and finally ending at the sports hall and outdoor sports areas merging into a meadow-like landscape.

The multi-storey assembly hall is the centre of the school and main venue for school events. Direct connection to a multi-purpose room, dining room and library permits diverse utilisation and spatial organisation during events. On the ground floor, the spatial programme includes art, craft, music and computer science rooms, as well as a teaching kitchen. On the upper floors, corridors around the inner courtyard lead from the assembly hall to classrooms and science rooms.

A compact and orientation-friendly design together with numerous places for students to meet and stay, creates a vibrant school landscape and promotes communication between lessons. Wood, a typical local material, is used on the façade. The liveliness and naturalness of the vertical larch wood structure composed of lighter and darker elements continues inside with wooden floors in the classrooms and wooden windows.