community center and school cafeteria
Sustainably Useful
The community center is a grant-funded project by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund. The project’s goals were integrated already in the preliminary planning phase.
Useful
The new school cafeteria for the neighboring European School is not only an infrastructural addition to the school site. With its extended range of uses, it also creates a new meeting place in Pasewalk's “Oststadt”, offering facilities for all age groups. It provides useful infrastructure for the surrounding residential area: the cafeteria with kitchen and food serving area, rooms for the youth club with an adjoining covered outdoor space, and offices for on-site branches of municipal social services. The cafeteria's dining hall also serves as multifunctional space with direct access to the outdoors. The building unites all these different activities under one roof.
The structure is single-story, featuring gabled roofs of varying heights, whose silhouettes expresses the individual spatial characters to the exterior. The roof volume provides diverse spatial heights, tailored to the functions of the rooms. It also houses the exposed technical installations. Beneath the gabled cantilevers, covered areas are provided for cafeteria deliveries and for the club’s event space.
The sloped roof functions as a fifth facade. This aspect is particularly important in this location, where views of the new building are mainly from above, given to the surrounding multi story buildings. Together, the roof and outer walls form a clear, unified figure with their light, reflective metal cladding. The graded optical permeability of both outer and inner walls encourages dialogue – internally among the various users, and externally with the surrounding context. With its architectural appearance and scale, the building fits into the existing urban fabric, enriching it with a new image appropriate to its program. It has the presence and visual impact required at the site while allowing diverse orientations and connections between interior and exterior spaces.In urban terms and through its extended functional options, the new building brings lasting spatial and social improvement to the area. The sites perimeter extends to the school campus, the green space of the future city park, and the adjacent residential developments.
Sustainable
The building concept is based on qualifying and systematizing both the structual shell and the finishing elements. The principle of "raw equals finished" serves to minimize finishing work and allows fast-track-construction.The timber-hybrid construction combines the potential of the materials used. A small amount of reinforced concrete and steel provides a solid base, supports load transfer, enables thermal activation of components, and offers thermal mass. Walls and roofs are entirely, and interior fittings largely, prefabricated using timber panel or timber frame construction, assembled with screw, nail, and rivet connections. Given the exposed location, the wood-fiber-insulated structure is enclosed by an outer, ventilated weather skin made of trapezoidal sheet metal. All components and layers of the structure – including the visibly technical installations within the roof space – can be dismantled by type and reused.
The optimization of life-cycle performance and operational efficiency results from a consistently applied „low-tech“ concept in interaction with the building envelope. The various layers of the outer skin overlap, complement, and interpenetrate one another in their structual-physical effects. Component tempering in the ground slab, combined with differentiated wall permeabilities, provides solar gains and "tiled-stove warmth" in winter, as well as natural night cooling in summer.
