Piranesi Mention 2025: Wienerwald High School, Tullnerbach, Lower Austria

The Wienerwald High School is considered a trendsetter in recent Austrian school construction. Above all, it is not a dull, straight-A student, but rather a spatial experience tailored to its idyllic location.

When we hear the word “school”, we usually think of “clusters” or “departments”, as learning concepts and spatial configurations are supposed to correlate directly with each other. Increasingly, however, it also seems to be about sensory space, about what happens between the actual functions, what we experience, consciously or unconsciously. As a matter of fact, pupils have always known that it is the breaks that matter. And that is exactly how you could start to describe a school that exudes everything but the smell of annoying hours in class. But this is hardly surprising. Hemma Fasch and Jakob Fuchs and their office have long been regarded as key figures when it comes to the Austrian school building culture. This has been evident since the mid-1990s in the more than a dozen such buildings for which they are responsible, while their Schwechat School from 2006 can be considered a typological predecessor to the Tullnerbach project.

When the Ministry of Education and the Education Authority announced an EU-wide public planning competition for the BRG Purkersdorf school branch, which had become too small, fasch&fuchs.architekten took up the challenge. The task was to construct a replacement building on the existing site while the school remained in operation. A third Lower Austrian school location for a general secondary school, with a focus on natural sciences and artistic subjects, was to be created. For the high school, not far from the Danube metropolis and yet in the middle of the Vienna Woods, there were surprisingly few educational requirements – apart from 32 regular classes and rooms for the planned afternoon care. A single gym and gymnastics room are part of the programme, while other sports facilities are shared with the prestigious historic institution Norbertinum and the primary school next door. It was therefore clear that the new building had to do justice to the panoramic view on the steep southern slope, both indoors and outdoors. In the jargon of the project developers, this means “favourable use of the open space”. The topography was therefore a determining design factor, and now you do not even notice how the four-storey building (43,000 cubic metres), staggered towards the south, disappears into the slope. It is worth comparing this with other competition entries, which obstruct the beautiful clearing with additional structures – including the platform on which the sports facility now basks in the sun, beneath which a parking level disappears. The completed school building presents itself as elegant and relaxed, like a modern residential complex. Its location, half below ground, is never a problem – quite the contrary, in fact. Securing the excavation pit with a temporarily boarded-up shotcrete wall, on the other hand, was both costly and challenging, but the geological soil conditions on site made this necessary.

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