The Student House at TU Braunschweig, a 280-year-old university in Germany, is a groundbreaking intervention that redefines architectural education. Designed by Berlin-based architects Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, the 1000 square meters, two-storied pavilion has been awarded the prestigious 2024 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Awards in the Architecture category. The building's bold, white, steel superstructure and glazed curtain wall evoke memories of Mies van der Rohe's iconic Crown Hall building at the Illinois Institute of Technology which revolutionized architectural education in the 20th century.
Düsing and Hacke have developed an experimental campus typology that embraces contemporary teaching methods, fostering flexibility, inclusivity, and sustainability. The building, inducted in 2015 and completed in 2022, is the result of a collaborative competition entry by the architects. The design features unobstructed, non-hierarchical, multi-functional spaces assembled as a modular system of steel beams and wooden floors, which can be disassembled and reconfigured to adapt to new programs and contexts.
The pavilion's strategic location beside the Oker River integrates it seamlessly into the university campus, connecting it to key buildings such as the Audimax, the Technical Institute, and the Forum Square. The ground floor is organized as an open plan, growing around a centrally located service block within a 3m x 3m square grid composed of hollow steel profiles. The absence of internal walls allows the emergence of distinct zones, accommodating various spatial identities such as individual workstations, meeting rooms, conference rooms, lounges, and common areas. This versatile disposition of the plan promotes an egalitarian ecosystem, devoid of spatial hierarchies and gridlocked areas.
The first storey's floor plate is a composition of ribbed wooden decks, inserted and bolted into the beam frames, allowing for future dismantling and reassembly. Breaking away from the planar grid of the ground floor, the configuration of the floor plate creates two distinct volumes, intimate, single-height zones and double-height common areas. The programmatic distribution on the first floor is defined by an orthogonal network of staircases and aisle-sized hallways, interspersed with enclosed volumes and voids. The scattered staircases serve as separate pathways for circulation within the various zones, enhancing their unique character and emphasizing the specific activities associated with them.
The building's material palette, composed of structural steel, timber, and modular glass facade panels, epitomizes the pavilion typology by illustrating a lightweight and ephemeral structure. The selection of materials and construction techniques is guided by the intentionality to reduce energy consumption and maximize recycling opportunities. This innovative and sustainable solution involves reusing not just the building materials but also entire architectural elements such as facade panels, stairs, and platforms. The strategy for circular construction is further enhanced by the use of renewable energy sources and ground probes for temperature regulation.
The Student House at TU Braunschweig aims to revolutionize modes of knowledge generation, transcending hierarchies and permanence, much like its Miesian counterpart. Its modularity and material palette address climate change concerns, just as the Crown Hall addressed post-war scarcity. The pavilion's aesthetic, reminiscent of the International Style, restores an endangered European identity in architectural education.
FSE: TUB
Current Price: €42.50
Change: Unchanged
The technical analysis model suggests a sideways trend for TUB, with the stock trading between the support level of €40.80 and the resistance level of €44.20. The moving averages and MACD indicator do not indicate a strong bullish or bearish sentiment, while the Fibonacci levels and Bollinger Bands suggest that the stock is trading within its expected range. The impact of the Student Pavilion's design and recognition on TUB's share price is expected to be positive in the long term, as the university's reputation for innovation and sustainability in architectural education is likely to attract more students and funding.
