Edificio scolastico ad alta efficienza energetica. La Hesserwaldschule a Weiterstadt

About the topic of the energy sustainability criteria for educational buildings, the article describes a new building project, by Wulf Arkiteckten, which boasts extremely high standards in terms of energy saving. This contribution aims to expose the design proposal of a school near Frankfurt as an example of architecture that goes over the normative evolution, that has determined the typological modifications of the school buildings in Italy and in Germany. The architects challenge was to demonstrate how a project of a school building could respect strict criteria of energy saving and of cost management without sacrificing the compositional fundamentals taught by the most revolutionary interpreters of scholastic architecture such as Scharoun and Hertzberger. The lower secondary school realized in Weiterstadt can host 700 students; the building is strongly integrated into the place (a glade) where it is located thanks to the envelope’s soft colors, the use of natural materials such as brick and wood and the exaltation of diffused natural light. The great integration with the surrounding landscape and the use of brick for the envelope are two of the design choices that allowed to respect the Passivhaus standards.