School construction Open Source

2018-2023

LPH 2-9

The Montag Foundations have initiated the introduction of a programme phase, the so-called ‘Phase Zero’, in school construction and developed it into an established planning tool. We, in the person of Raphaella Burhenne, who heads a dedicated team in our office for this consultancy service, are school construction consultants certified by the Montag Foundations. However, a carefully planned phase zero does not guarantee an educationally innovative and architecturally sophisticated school building. This is where the school construction open source project comes in.

The project bundles integrated planning and process knowledge in school construction using a sample plan of a reference building and makes this available to all stakeholders in order to fulfil the complex planning requirements in school construction more quickly and at the same time with high quality. The product is not understood as a rigid copy template, but is open and flexible in its further development. In contrast to the usual competitive thinking, it enables an aggregation of expertise in the sense of ‘crowd thinking’. As a result, the planning shows that on the basis of an addable room module of approx. 8x8m, a sanitary and technical core of approx. 4x16m and a surrounding outdoor space layer, which accommodates both escape routes and learning space extensions in the outdoor area, an efficient, versatile and low-tech school space for a modern pedagogical teaching approach is created. The fact that spaces have been created that also fulfil the desires of many people for a place to live and/or work was not the aim of the spatial design, but shows how much school learning is (rightly) moving closer to places of life today. The classroom of entire school generations, which was characterised by the militaristic Wilhelminian imperial era, has finally had its day!