The Wave - Playground Design for a School in Villach

An area of concrete is laid out over the school grounds, offset to the existing building grid. The designers, an architect and an artist, havecreated a concrete slab with a three-dimensional, walk-in, wave-like sculptural fold resembling a rucked-up carpet. Special software was developed to implement and calculate the design. The form was cast on flexible fibreboard, supported on composite wood boarding at one-metre centres. Reinforcement was laid over this formwork, and the 10 cm wave was executed in two layers of sprayed concrete. Only the lower third of the wave is insolid concrete. This space-defining sculpture forms the centrepoint of the playground, and school pupils now use it to lean against or as asurface for skateboarding.