Project SheetAdieu Tristesse!

Municipal day-care centre Tunzhofer Straße, Stuttgart

Project Panel

Clients

Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart, Hochbauamt
User

Stadt Stuttgart
Effective Area

937 m²
Floor Area

1.781 m²
Floor Volume

7.101 m³
Completion

2015
Photos

Wolf-Dieter Gericke

Project PDF

A strong image, a metaphor is capable of divorcing the building from its former use as a clinic and helping to project its new identity on the cityscape as a day-care centre.

Nils Krause

A former psychiatric clinic was to be repurposed, initially for an interim period of five years. It was therefore important to create a well-working makeshift solution for children between three months and school age, despite limitied finacial means. Simultaneously, we wanted to send a strong signal of a new beginning in the external appearance.

» In fact, there was no choice but taking on the context head-on, with as much vigour as possible. We wanted the building, including its interior and exterior spaces, to burst with energy, conveying an optimistic development lookout, at least for the children. «

Nils Krause

The clinic used to be a treatment unit for people suffering from depression and drug addiction. This former use should not have a negative impact on the day-care centre. Consequently, colour was an appropriate remedy to dissipate dreariness in the typical 1970s building with its fair-faced concrete walls contoured with wooden boards and dark brown ribbon windows.

We collaborated with the artist Judith Brucklacher on the conversion of a former psychiatric clinic, originally for a five-year period of interim use. Together we devised the metaphor of a rose bush and the birds hidden within, an image that now covers the building and sets it aglow in bright colours.
Inside, this theme is being continued. The children’s coat hangers are little nesting boxes, seats take on the forms of mushrooms, trees, or tree stumps.
Colour - as a materially minimal intervention – can effectively underscore the impact of any architectural concept.
Since some of the outdoor areas are located well below street level, the former patients’ roof terrace was converted into a large outdoor play area.
The existing hospital building on the grounds of the Bürgerhospital in Stuttgart before its conversion and reorganisation.

» I wanted to transform through the design everything recalling the building's gloomy past in order to make it a place where children can feel safe and free. «

Judith Brucklacher

How did the former use of the building affect your design and your colour concept?

Elements

Location