La corte e le stanze. L’ampliamento dell’Accademia Cattolica a Stoccarda di Arno Lederer / Courtyard and rooms. The extension of Catholic Academy in Stuttgart by Arno Lederer

The Catholic Academy is located in a triangular-shaped site between two busy streets, right across from the Botanical Gardens, outside from the Stuttgart’s city center. Lederer + Ragnarsdóttir + Oei decided to establish a residential extension of it in continuity with the previous building, adding an S-shaped curving wing and a diagonal hall to the south-facing side. They created a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden with an apple tree, separated from the Paracelsusstrasse by a wall made of broken brick. The S-shaped hall on the ground floor leads, past alcoves with views of the garden, to the chapel. Small floor-height windows make tangible the volume of its wall. Both of the upper floors, accommodating people rooms (students and visitors), are accessible via a long single flight of stairs which follow the curve of the building volume. Twenty-four individual rooms are lined along the two floors of the “serpentine”. While materiality prevails in the common spaces, mint green and apricot are the accents which dominate the atmosphere of these otherwise minimalistic rooms. Wicker railings characterize the balconies of the rooms, completely different from the white raw plastered surface of the volume. The opposition between the S-shape volume and the brick wall, with the trilithic structure of the public room façade, is the explanation of the space design and the construction of the urban block. As a matter of fact, the inner space has the civil architecture as boundaries, where common place is closed to the “houses” of the people; the exterior space has the “simple” and traditional brick wall as element of order. The human dimension of the wall offers the recognizable aspect to the public space of the street, like the other historical houses along the both sides, and protects the private and collective space of the courtyard. In this way, the houses for students belong to the city’s structure and the garden is the usual presence inside the “palace” unique block. The face of this architecture demonstrates the ancient proportional approach to the existing things and answers to the modern function and spatial organization as “a part” of complex organism.