Kindergarten Feldgatterweg
Lana/BZ Italy Florian Maurer
Alexander the Great freed Midas’ ox cart by cutting the Gordian Knot with his sword. Christopher Columbus showed Spanish nobles how to make an egg stand it on its tip by bashing it in (although some attribute this feat to Filippo Brunelleschi, a version that I as an architect naturally prefer). Swift, impatient action can be so reward- ing! Indeed, it can be the only way out sometimes: when site con- straints and client demands had defeated all our attempts at find- ing a disciplined, rectangular, ‘European’ form for our building, we grabbed the layout in despair, folded it like a harmonica, and thus made it work. This is the main point of our design.
t he Kindergarten Feldgatterweg lies at the outskirts of Lana, a small city in the bilingual Italian province of South Tyrol/Alto Adige, where mild climate, vineyards and mountain scenery used to atract tourists such as Empress Sissi and the Russian Czars. In exchange for increased density the developer of a new multi-hous- ing development had to construct the kindergarten and turn it over to the municipality, and we were assigned a corner of his plot for it. The building serves two distinct user groups which had to be func- tionally well separated, with their own entrances: - The kindergarten (Kiga) required a large multi purpose room doubling as entrance and gathering space, three group rooms, and three sleeping-/activity rooms upstairs from the group rooms and directly connected to them. Southern aspect and access to an outdoor playground was mandatory. - The “Eltern Kind Zentrum” (Elki) serves a provincial program for pre-natal classes and adult education, and required a series of multi purpose rooms of different sizes. Their openness made them useful to create the the transparency and connection between street and inner couryard the client also wanted. - Ancillary functions, kitchen, offices and counselling rooms are partly shared and complete the program. They could best be used to form a barrier between the kindergarten and the vehicle access to the interior of the housing development.
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