Stuttgart, Germany
Mission Title: School House Rocks - Aldinger and Aldinger’s Schoolhouse
Mission By: Roy Giamporcaro, Gianluca Di Giambattista
Mission Finished on Date: 25-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Got to the Aldinger and Aldinger school in Stuttgart.
- Shoot from indoors and outdoors, moving along its form, especially pull the camera from the earth to the sky to capture the expansive building.
- Speak with an architect who worked on the project, what were the driving principals that they used to build the school? How does the design mirror its purpose?
- Speak with a teacher from the school about how it works as a school. Does it mesh or clash with the educational philosophy of the school? Does it make her job as a teacher, easier or more difficult? How does she feel it fits into the community?
- If possible, talk to some kids and parents about how they like (or dislike) the building.
- In shooting your footage, be playful or didactic make your documentary play like a school child or with the idea of school in general.
TRAVEL BAG
Can a schoolhouse be built that children might actually like going to?
No more classes, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks. A near universal school chant that students holler as they run out of classrooms. But what if the school, rather than following the rigid bureaucracy of education, mirrors the discursive and playful rhythms of childhood. We’re not talking about the mad energy of kid mimicked by Pee-Wee’s Playhouse but architecture firm Aldinger and Aldinger’s Stuttgart schoolhouse, which has a delightful rhythm to it, something peaceful, organic, glowing with a soft focus nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. The new schoolhouse nearly looks like a tree house inviting the sullen schoolchild in all of us to stop sulking an head in. Made of wood, it looks like it’s stretching its arms, expanding upwards. But all infrastructural design projects that break the norm have the same onus upon them as their more bureaucratic brethren, does it work?
The combined primary and secondary school uses local educational philosphers Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, but breaks Steiner’s strict dictates for what a school should be. Aldinger & Aldinger normally sleek modernist style made concessions to the Steiner ideas, creating a compromise between modernity and the tradition of the ideas upon which the school was founded. An investigation of the school should capture the community to which it serves, the houses, and streets, the normal people and rhythms of the neighborhood.
