Downtown Elementary School in Heilbronn

A new building for a three-track, full-day elementary school is to be constructed on an existing educational campus. The design creates a distinctive, identity-forming address. The new building, which includes four learning houses, an administrative area, and freely usable areas, fits into the heterogeneous environment on a large scale while maintaining spatial references to the adjacent existing buildings.

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The new elementary school is designed as a flexible, child-friendly learning landscape that combines educational requirements with spatial identity formation. The auditorium, which is also available to other schools on the campus, doubles as an entrance hall. The main access route runs centrally through the building – on the ground floor in the form of a spacious seating staircase that functions both as a vertical connecting axis and as a grandstand for the auditorium. There is a clear spatial separation between public, semi-public, and school areas; at the same time, all learning clusters are connected to the communal areas. The routing is intuitive, child-friendly, and at the same time creates a variety of visual connections within the building. The innovative and modular building structure with consistent timber construction and clay cap ends is reflected, among other things, in striking and identity-forming cross supports.

Existing open space qualities, such as the striking tree population, are retained. The play and open space concept reflects the future-oriented vision of the “New Inner City School”, which focuses on individual learning, community, and democratic values.

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Competition
07 2025 / Honorable Mention

Landscape Architecture
RB+P Landschaftsarchitektur, Kassel

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Visualizations
Tegmark, Bukarest

Model
Béla Berec, Stuttgart

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