Surveys a decade of school building design by Berlin- and Lausanne-based AFF Architekten.

School buildings are among the most complex design, planning, and construction tasks for architects. They reflect educational concepts as well as cultural and spatial ideas of their time. Berlin- and Lausanne-based AFF Architekten is a collective of architects, researchers, and crafts people that understand schools as spaces of identification as much as they are places of learning. Rooted in a rigorous engagement with typology, they treat form and space as the very framework within which contemporary pedagogical concepts unfold, aiming to create buildings that foster identity through the interplay of shape and use.

New Schools on the Block is a typological inventory. It features forty of AFF’s school designs, built and unrealized, for towns and cities in Germany and Switzerland through floor plans and photographs of their surroundings, entrance halls, stairwells, classrooms, recreational and storage spaces. While floor plans invite the imagination of spaces, images of realized buildings demonstrate that even details such as a handrail or a sanitary room can be instructive. A comic strip about everyday school life adds an extra touch of realism. Essays that situate AFF’s designs within the broader contemporary debate on the transformation of schools and a conversation with the architects offer helpful background information.