Kindergartens sprawl across the ground almost everywhere they are built, but Francis Kéré has stacked one five storeys high in spruce on a Munich site measuring 15.1 by 17.46 metres, handing children timber slides to travel between floors. That is according to the Technical University of Munich, which opened the Kinderoase this week with places for 60 children, the first permanent European building by the 2022 Pritzker Prize winner.
“Play is the core of this design,” Kéré, who has held TUM’s Chair of Architectural Design and Participation since 2017, told Dezeen, explaining that a dense campus and a small site forced the building upward into what he calls a vertical playground. Sliding to the floor below becomes an invitation to play, with the descent itself part of the building’s circulation.
The cleverest move stands at the street front, where Kéré stacked the multi-level playground against noisy Gabelsbergerstrasse so that play itself shields the learning and rest rooms placed at the quiet rear. Noise, in other words, guards against noise, with the loudest part of the programme doing the acoustic work a solid wall would otherwise do.
Spruce carries the structure from the ground floor to the roof, with ash parquet and stair treads throughout, and concrete confined to the foundations and a single emergency stair at the rear of the 1,541-square-metre building. Wrapping it are 2,085 weathering steel louvres running 7,300 metres end to end, the bulk of the 100 tonnes of steel on the project, folded across a blackened timber façade that gives the Kinderoase its sculptural street presence.
Fire safety was central to the concept from the outset, as it had to be with young children occupying five storeys of exposed timber, and it fell to TUM timber structures professor Stefan Winter, who engineered the structure, fire strategy and building physics through bauart Konstruktions. Winter worked inside a project team drawn almost entirely from the university’s own faculty, with Hermann Kaufmann, emeritus holder of TUM’s Chair of Timber Architecture and Design, translating the design into buildable timber through his Vorarlberg practice HK Architekten whilst TUM professor Thomas Auer developed the energy concept.
“TUM’s internationally recognised expertise in timber construction has now found its visible expression,” Kaufmann said of a building that puts the university’s timber research on permanent display in central Munich, where the timber not only carries the loads but carries the children down.
Inside, each age group occupies its own floor across 700 square metres of children’s space, with the middle and upper levels holding communal areas for play, sport and meals, including a multipurpose sports room. At the very top, a partially covered rooftop terrace known as the Himmelswiese, or sky meadow, gives children a sheltered place to run, feel the wind and look out across Munich.
Paying for all of it was TUM honorary senator Ingeborg Pohl, an entrepreneur who commissioned the building, financed its construction and donated it to the university to help women in academic careers keep working after starting families. Operated by the Munich Student Union, the centre now carries her name as the Ingeborg Pohl Kinderoase an der TUM.
“I am fulfilling my wish to support high-performing women,” Pohl said at the handover, thanking everyone involved in what she called a very ambitious construction period of two and a quarter years.
“Something truly special has been created here,” TUM president Thomas Hofmann said, crediting a building of unique architectural quality in the middle of Munich’s museum quarter with helping parents reconcile work and family life.
Standing on ground left undeveloped since the end of World War II, the Kinderoase fills a former car park at Gabelsbergerstrasse 41, wedged between the main campus and the university cafeteria. Wood Central understands the design team also proposed extending the rooftop terrace onto the neighbouring cafeteria roof, linked by a slide, creating a shared space for children, students and staff.
Kéré, whose first buildings were schools in his home village of Gando in Burkina Faso, described the commission as a beautiful responsibility, with the Kinderoase designed entirely from the perspective of the children who will use it. His hope, he said, is that the building makes children curious and encourages them to invent games and do things together.
From this month the Munich Student Union runs the centre day to day, TUM confirmed, with 60 children set to fill five spruce floors on a site that stood empty for more than 80 years.
