Where Generations Unite

THE SITE

Kleinpaschleben had an elementary school. The school closed. What it left behind was a sports hall that still worked, a school building that no longer did, and 16,000 square metres of ground between them with nothing asked of it.

The brief was to turn that open ground into a community centre, under the motto Healthy Together Living. The building would be repurposed. The harder question was what would bring anyone to it, because a community centre in a village this size cannot advertise. It gets its visitors from people who were walking past anyway and decided to come in.

The site is a wedge held inside the village, roads along the south and east, houses backing onto the north and west, and the Dorfanger — the old village green — just beyond the south-west corner. The ground was already at the centre of things. It had simply stopped being for anybody.

THE SCHEME

One route does most of the work. The activity lane starts at the main entrance, runs past the sports hall and the courts, opens out at the event grounds and the social meeting place, and ends in woodland. It is not only how you get about the site: most of what happens here happens on the lane or immediately off it, and everything else is arranged around it. Nobody has to understand the plan to find anything.

What the lane passes changes as it goes. Sport and play sit at the entrance end, where the hall already made noise: basketball, table tennis, mini football, the playground, the outdoor gym. Past a semi-quiet band the ground goes over to mixed woodland, a quiet area, gardening plots, a pollination station and a bee hotel. Someone who came for company and someone who came to be left alone can both be on the site at once without either having to go somewhere else.

The lane is dyed concrete laid to a 1.5 per cent fall, and it has no steps on it. Accessibility was the brief’s priority, and a priority like that decides a route rather than dressing one: the surface an eighty-year-old crosses without thinking about it is the same surface that takes a pram, a wheelchair and a child on a scooter. The fall is the other half of the same decision, because a level surface that holds water is not accessible in November.

Elsewhere the surface changes to suit what stands on it — bark chips on the woodland trail, interlocking bricks on the event grounds, poured-in-place rubber under the play equipment. Most of the site is soft, which is also how the water is handled: it goes into the ground where it falls rather than into a pipe. And nothing that still worked was removed. The sports hall keeps its job, the school building takes a new one, and the scheme is set out around both.

This scheme has two authors. We drew it with David Baah Oduro, from the site analysis through to the last sheet, and every surface on it was settled between us.

WHAT TO NOTICE

The trees thin as you go in. Around the edge they are planted densely, a belt that closes the ground off from the roads on two sides and the houses backing onto the other two. Toward the middle they thin out, until the event grounds and the social meeting place sit in the open with only scattered canopy over them.

That is a sightline, not a picture. A space meant to be used by everybody has to be one you can see across: a parent needs to watch a child from a bench, and somebody arriving on their own needs to see who is already there before deciding to walk in. The belt does the screening at the boundary so that the middle does not have to.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

None of this is built, and the part that matters most is not landscape at all. The scheme is designed to bring people to a community centre inside a school building that has yet to be given its new use. If that use does not arrive, the ground is a good park beside a closed school, and everything above is a careful description of a route to somewhere nobody is going.

Accessibility is a condition rather than a construction. The lane is level and has no steps, and it stays that way for as long as somebody keeps it that way. Ground freezes here; a surface that settles or lifts by twenty millimetres has a step in it, and twenty millimetres is a step to anyone on wheels. Winter is the sharper version of the same problem. The duty to clear and grit falls on whoever owns the ground, and what has to be cleared is a strip of roughly 1.20 metres by seven in the morning. For those months the generous level route in these drawings is whatever width somebody with a shovel decided to make it.

And the school closed for a reason. A village loses its elementary school when there are not enough children to fill it, and this scheme puts a playground, an outdoor gym and a mini football pitch on the ground where that school stood. It is drawn for the generations still here and for the ones that might come back. Only one of those is a fact.