Continuous social and technological change is consistently transforming our learning and working environments. The challenge for buildings is to provide space for these change processes. How can structures grow, how will they change and what are the constants that create identity and ensure spatial quality? And what is the nature of the new places of learning and knowledge?
While pure knowledge transfer in the context of an increasingly interconnected digital world, in which everything can happen everywhere, will be less and less tied to space and time, the places of learning and knowledge will provide platform for direct encounters, exchanges and discourses. They allow for debugging, reflection, demonstration and exploration, but above all the should tigger curiosity and offer opportunities.
Developing the layout concepts for the new Learning Center, we moved away from clearly recognizable spatial hierachies with their classic, aligned rooms an corridor systems to changeable landscapes. Differently arranged, closed and open space elements, which allow different constellations and forms of learning in changing group sizes, are places for collaboration, communication as well as for concentration and recovery. We gradually shifted the relationship between fixed spatial structures to more open, freely recordable areas. With first cluster concepts of free and closed areas, as well as switchable rooms with alternative access systems, the boundaries between classroom and corridor begin to relativize, the dividing line becomes a threshold zone that can be open and modulatable. Corridors widen and become front zones for changing uses.
Reducing the rooms to a few, large classrooms the corridors begin to dissolve, the closed spaces move freely in the floor plan and are surrounded by strongly differentiated, open learning and movement zones. In the complete opening as the most radical stage of development, there are no physical spaces left, the entire floor plan becomes a freely playable, coherent surface. Structuring is made by technology modules, curtains and movable walls or furniture.
For the layout of the new Learning Center, we have combined this extensive openness with big impulse rooms as the starting and anchor point of learning in the group. The fixed rooms move to the building ends leaving the middle freely playable. The corridors are dissolved, only a few fixed service modules and movable furniture divide the space, create niches and areas and places that are easy to change.
The arrangement creates a natural zoning of the floor plans. The private and protected environment of the impulse rooms is located along the northern and southern facades, the upstream, semipublic and and open group areas develop up to the central zone of the so-called terminal. Visitors and course participants arrive here, survey the entire space, orient themselves by the large row of monitors, entcounter and meet or they find food and drinks at the common large cafe bar. The staircase in the atrium with its wide seating steps in the center of the building conntects the two levels.
The use and furnishing concepts were as open as the large areas of the floor plan. A jointly developed catalog of playing fields in the beginning shows very naive and abstract usage opportunities of collaboration and learning studios, focus places, self-learing places, team zones, places of experience or consulting niches. Finally the definiton of a diverse and flexible furnishing was born. The use of the places remain multilayer, they are not determinated and can be easily shaped and changed. It is the open field of opportinities that makes the Learning Center an agile, vibrant place of exchange and knowledge.
Michael Muellen, November 2018
Continuous social and technological change is consistently transforming our learning and working environments. The challenge for buildings is to provide space for these change processes. How can structures grow, how will they change and what are the constants that create identity and ensure spatial quality? And what is the nature of the new places of learning and knowledge?
While pure knowledge transfer in the context of an increasingly interconnected digital world, in which everything can happen everywhere, will be less and less tied to space and time, the places of learning and knowledge will provide platform for direct encounters, exchanges and discourses. They allow for debugging, reflection, demonstration and exploration, but above all the should tigger curiosity and offer opportunities.
Developing the layout concepts for the new Learning Center, we moved away from clearly recognizable spatial hierachies with their classic, aligned rooms an corridor systems to changeable landscapes. Differently arranged, closed and open space elements, which allow different constellations and forms of learning in changing group sizes, are places for collaboration, communication as well as for concentration and recovery. We gradually shifted the relationship between fixed spatial structures to more open, freely recordable areas. With first cluster concepts of free and closed areas, as well as switchable rooms with alternative access systems, the boundaries between classroom and corridor begin to relativize, the dividing line becomes a threshold zone that can be open and modulatable. Corridors widen and become front zones for changing uses.
Reducing the rooms to a few, large classrooms the corridors begin to dissolve, the closed spaces move freely in the floor plan and are surrounded by strongly differentiated, open learning and movement zones. In the complete opening as the most radical stage of development, there are no physical spaces left, the entire floor plan becomes a freely playable, coherent surface. Structuring is made by technology modules, curtains and movable walls or furniture.
For the layout of the new Learning Center, we have combined this extensive openness with big impulse rooms as the starting and anchor point of learning in the group. The fixed rooms move to the building ends leaving the middle freely playable. The corridors are dissolved, only a few fixed service modules and movable furniture divide the space, create niches and areas and places that are easy to change.
The arrangement creates a natural zoning of the floor plans. The private and protected environment of the impulse rooms is located along the northern and southern facades, the upstream, semipublic and and open group areas develop up to the central zone of the so-called terminal. Visitors and course participants arrive here, survey the entire space, orient themselves by the large row of monitors, entcounter and meet or they find food and drinks at the common large cafe bar. The staircase in the atrium with its wide seating steps in the center of the building conntects the two levels.
The use and furnishing concepts were as open as the large areas of the floor plan. A jointly developed catalog of playing fields in the beginning shows very naive and abstract usage opportunities of collaboration and learning studios, focus places, self-learing places, team zones, places of experience or consulting niches. Finally the definiton of a diverse and flexible furnishing was born. The use of the places remain multilayer, they are not determinated and can be easily shaped and changed. It is the open field of opportinities that makes the Learning Center an agile, vibrant place of exchange and knowledge.
Michael Muellen, November 2018