Sirius School & Works Yard Hochstrasse, Zurich-Fluntern

Playgrounds in Zurich's residential neighborhoods are as popular as they are scarce. But when the public sector needed space in the past, this scarce public space was cut back even further. The example of Siriuswiese shows how the road at the edge of the park was misused as a storage area for road construction, how a temporary kindergarten was placed in the open space, how a tennis court was fenced off. Against this background, it was soon decided that the new school building should not stand on the meadow, but next to it. For only in this way can the integral depth of the open space between Gladbachstrasse and Hofstrasse be experienced. For this reason, the new school building is pushed into the adjacent city block, so deep that the entire break area is also located on the side of the Sirius meadow. In this way, the quiet sides of the school area are oriented towards the residential gardens and the noisy sides towards the meadow. 

Kindergarten, school, music school, sports hall, tennis club, work yard: six independent institutions meet in a limited space. There is no room for them next to each other - which is why they are all grouped together in one building. This leaves the most free space for breaks, games and meetings. 

Yesterday's school was a building with homogeneously large rooms and a homogeneously collective quality. The new tasks brought about by the change of system to dayschools and the new teaching concepts, require on the one hand the provision of rooms that are much more collectively programmed, and on the other hand, rooms in which the intimacy of a residential situation is sought - the cluster shared by three school classes whose members feel at home in the manageable group. For this to succeed, the clusters must be free of transit traffic, much like apartments at a staircase. And the central learning areas must not be - to stay with the image of the apartment - dim interior worlds surrounded by classrooms, but should have views, light and air, like living rooms.