Caruso St John Architects

1998
Location: Wörgl, Austria
Project Status: Competition, second prize

A short-listed competition design to extend a large school. The small town in the mountains required new classrooms and a gymnasium to be added to the existing building from the 1970s.

The existing school has a concrete frame and shaped slab structure in the structuralist manner, with a strict correlation between rooms and the structural grid, giving the building a disorientating similarity and lack of hierarchy to all its spaces. The new building has a different tectonic of prefabricated timber walls and floors, with a greater flexibility to make more generous spatial hierarchies and groupings. Some modifications were made to the existing entrance and main hall and the front of the building was given more presence by the location of the addition. The project made a range of distinct places giving the whole a stronger formal identity.