A survey of a decade of school building design by Berlin- and Lausanne-based design firm AFF Architekten

School buildings are among the most complex design, planning, and construction tasks for architects. They reflect educational concepts as well as cultural and spatial ideas of their time.

New Schools on the Block offers a survey of a decade of school building design by Berlin- and Lausanne-based AFF Architekten, a collective of architects, researchers, and crafts people. AFF's understanding of schools is that they are spaces of identification as much as they are places of learning. They aim to create buildings opening-up spaces for experiences that foster identity through the interplay of shape and use.

New Schools on the Block is a typological inventory. It features 40 of AFF's school designs, built and unrealized, for towns and cities in Germany and Switzerland through floor plans and photographs of their surroundings, entrance halls, stairwells, classrooms, recreational and storage spaces. While floor plans invite the imagination of spaces, images of realized buildings demonstrate that even details such as a handrail or a sanitary room can be instructive. A comic strip about everyday school life adds an extra touch of realism.

Essays on historic and contemporary school building design and a conversation with AFF Architekten provide background information.

• Englische Ausgabe von New Schools on the Bock. Schulbauten ein typologischer Fundus (ISBN 978-3-03860-469-3)

  Autorentext

  AFF Architekten wurde 1997 von den Brüdern Martin und Sven Fröhlich in Weimar gegründet und arbeitet heute als Kollektiv aus Architekt:innen, Handwerker:innen und Forscher:innen mit Büros in Berlin und Lausanne. Martin Fröhlich lehrt zudem als Associate Professor an der School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering der EPFL in Lausanne.