Day Nursery in Memmingen
- Jakob Schoof
In her will, the entrepreneur Karoline Goldhofer decreed that a day nursery should be created on the site of her villa, which was situated on the edge of an industrial area. Instead of demolishing the existing building, which was clearly too small for its new function, the architects, Jörg Heiler and Peter Geiger, simply removed a few linking tracts and the low-pitched roof. The three main sections of the villa – the house itself, the garage and the swimming pool – now form the functional core of a structure that is almost twice the size of the original and that now has a flat roof and a translucent polycarbonate outer skin. Behind the largely two-layer facade, the surviving volumes are contained within generous, open spaces that serve as a cloakroom, for meals and for romping around. The former rooms of the villa accommodate more intimate group activities. Food is cooked in what was earlier the garage. Because the site slopes down to the east, the housing tract and the adjoining activities space are two storeys high here. On the lower ground floor of the house, the architects incorporated a workshop where children can experiment with recycling materials and production leftovers from nearby business enterprises.
