New Schoren schoolhouse
Basel, Switzerland
Competition 1st prize 2013
Project and execution 2014-2016
Putting into service January 2017
Schoren
School.
Overview
Client
Hochbau- und Planungsamt Basel-Stadt, Switzerland
Architecture
Lorenz Architekten, Basel, Switzerland
Team ZPF
Isak Buljubasic, Heike Egli-Erhart, Rafael Häni, Flavia Hofmeier, Antje Käser-Wassmer, Conor Murphy, Nico Ros, Sali Sadikaj, Flamin Tröster
With new residential buildings like schorenstadt and the Sky Lights Schoren high-rises, the Schoren quarter is transforming. Now, on the former Novartis Pharma AG site, it has a new schoolhouse. The carefully designed structure provides space for modern teaching of six primary school classes, an attached nursery school and a day-care facility. The forecourt along Schorenweg marks the school's entrance and the quarter's new centre, which the schoolhouse is intended to become.
The new building comprises two basement floors, the ground floor and one upper floor. The nursery school, day-care facility, foyer and assembly hall are on the ground floor. The upper floor accommodates the spacious, bright learning landscape with six classrooms for modern forms of learning. The extra-large double gymnasium within the structure is underground and spanned by steel beams, resembling a bridge. With large windows, the assembly hall right beside the entrance, as well as the gymnasium, open out towards the quarter. These are used by the school and also by associations and residents.
Support structure
The building's support structure is a reinforced-concrete skeleton. The slabs are untensioned flat slabs made of in-situ concrete, with span widths of up to 8.6 m. The vertical support elements, on which the floor slabs rest, are reinforced-concrete columns, which are either prefabricated or cast on site. The columns are distributed across the entire floor area in a rectangular grid.
Integrated gymnasium
In the gymnasium area, the ceiling above the ground floor is supported across the entire width of the building by eleven welded-together steel-concrete-composite sheet-steel beams with a mid-span elevation of up to 80 mm. Thus, the upper floor rests on a bridge structure with a span width of 25 m. Here, four single-span beams and seven continuous beams were used. The front of the gymnasium, with door openings, is column-free because of the concrete wall's structural design as a concrete truss.
Facade
The seamless exposed-concrete facade is designed with flexible support and only a few individual fastening points on the building, so it can move almost independently of the building.
Bicycle shelter
The roof slab (pre-stressed in a shape-retaining manner) protrudes on both sides by more than 5 m.