School Centre, Opfikon

The School Centre is part of the extension of the school campus Lättenwiese, which was built in the 70ties. The extension foresees two buildings added on the edges of the campus connecting the old town of Opfikon with the emerging area Zurich North, and thus creating a new urban orientation of the school campus. The low, wide volume of the School Centre refers to the scale of the old town.
The building is a hybrid and combines educational, social and administrative agendas such as a day-kindergarten, therapy (e.g. speech therapy) and office spaces. It is therefore not a typical school building but rather represents the fact that non-educational services for pupils (i.e. individual support, supervised lunch-time, health counseling etc.) has been integrated in the Swiss School System within the last few years.
The wide corridors, with their parallel set open spaces, establish a solid element within the building and maintain a network of the school and its educational and administrative services under one roof.
The conglomerate of different uses is bound together with a homogenized façade, covered with concrete panels in diverse shimmering greens and band windows. Glass and concrete are mounted in a grid, only where the inner public corridor touches the façade, huge framed windows are cut out.