A meandering play corridor that connects the honeycomb with the old building is flanked by solid timber frame walls with clay granulate fill and clay render that ensure a healthy interior climate. Along the corridor there are three cloakroom areas, each of which leads to two group rooms, catering for a total of 150 children in all. Above the cloakrooms there are small play galleries. These are cut sculpturally out of the rafter roof, which is insulated with cellulose and covered with planting.
The furniture made from silver fir, which was designed especially for the day care centre, responds to the curved shapes of the walls. Whereas pine flooring is used in the group rooms, the cloakrooms have screed floors that are coated with pigmented stone oil and offer a pleasant contrast to the mainly wooden surfaces.
The old prefab block has been given a thermal retrofit and it is planned to add further extensions in the course of the next few years. At an early stage the architects invited school pupils, craftspeople, teachers and parents to join in a participatory process in which, together, they developed the competition concept further.
Through the involvement of students from a Berlin vocational school it was possible to implement the elaborate new building relatively economically, even though high-quality construction materials were used.
This kind of wide-ranging collaboration during the building process was certainly in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner and his social principles.
