New Schools on the Block

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 which open 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.