Festival hall for a Waldorf School in Magdeburg

The new construction of the festival and event hall for the Waldorf School in Magdeburg is being built using sustainable timber construction methods. The plan is for a hall with 543 audience seats and a spatial concept that includes two classrooms as well as four smaller rooms for individual and group lessons in addition to the stage. The crystalline, layered design and natural, sustainable building materials take into account the requirements and ideas of Waldorf education and the client and determine the design and construction of the building. The design idea for the festival hall developed from the spatial situation in the middle of the existing school buildings. The building fits formally into the natural landscape of the site as an integral part of its surroundings. It takes up the form of the existing slope and uses it in the interior for the necessary staggering of the auditorium and stage tableau. The festival hall is planned as a sustainable timber frame construction with a roof structure made of timber trusses. Wood as a building material will be left visible both inside and outside on the façades. Wooden trusses form the main supporting structure of the roof. The wooden walls in the auditorium are folded for optimal acoustics. The outer walls are rhythmically structured by vertical wooden ribs and stand on a continuous concrete base. During construction, special attention was paid to reducing the building's carbon footprint. Concrete is therefore only found in the floor slab, foundations and plinth and, for fire safety reasons, is also used for the construction of the technical rooms under the foyer. The green, diagonally folded roofs once again emphasize in their materiality the clients' demand for a near-natural and ecologically valuable building design. The gradations of the roof construction allow daylight to enter the hall through the wooden trusses. Natural light flows into the interior through glass vertical joints that structure the façades, define kinks and direct the view into the surrounding park landscape. The main entrance to the festival hall is barrier-free accessible from the upper schoolyard: ramps and stairs on both sides of the festival hall allow for a functional and design dovetailing with the surroundings as well as barrier-free connections between the lower and upper access levels. The lower area of the auditorium, the stage area and the teaching and preparation rooms connected there are accessible without steps from the lower schoolyard.