Elementary School

In 1972, Matthias Szauer and Gottfried Fickl won their second school construction contract in Lower Austria. After an invited competition, they were awarded the contract for the construction of a new elementary school in Felixdorf. In this municipality, a school building was subsequently erected in the years 1973-1974 according to the model that had already proven itself several times. The center of the complex is a two-story, flat-roofed classroom wing, which is organized around a hall with a central staircase and which is open on the first floor on the southern side to the schoolyard in front. This open area was framed on two sides, on the east by a school caretaker's apartment and on the west by a gymnasium structure, and thus became a courtyard zone protected from view. In this courtyard there is also - in front of the glass wall of the hall - a dominating chimney that towers over the entire complex. From an architectural and layout point of view, this school building, executed entirely in the spirit of Brutalism, is to be seen as the successor to the Secondary School Purbach, but from a layout point of view it is supplemented by the terrace school typology, which was realized for the first time in the Großfeldsiedlung. In terms of interior design, the Felixdorf elementary school also features the concept already used in Purbach and Schwadorf, but with the innovation that the Felixdorf elementary school was the first to use orange chip carpeting as flooring in almost all areas. The Felixdorf elementary school and the Dopschstraße elementary school can thus be seen as a further development of the hall school type, in which Szauer and Fickl combined the typology of the terrace house, which was widespread in residential construction at the time, with that of the hall school.