LAUP - Colorful wooden day care center in Laupheim

The heart of the day care center is the “Kindergartenstraße”, which, as a playing area with ledges and niches, connects all rooms centrally. Both for children and educators, it can be used as a communication, recreation and play area, and its spacious and diverse areas can be used in multiple ways. The group areas are allocated along the play corridor. These extedend with each other via generous double sliding doors. The sanitary rooms are assigned directly to the group units and can be reached directly or from the central corridor.

The color scheme of the walls with its glazing of the natural wooden surfaces serves as orientation and structures the room. The carefully considered color concept also divides the rooms internally. To emphasize the special character of the wooden building, the walls were left untreated in the upper area. The surfaces that can be reached by children were glazed in color. The suspended ceiling is made of woodwool panels with seemingly disorderly scattered standard lights. The light fixtures can be switched individually and allow different lighting scenarios.

Utility rooms, meeting and break rooms complement the group units in the front area of the kindergarten near the entrance.

In addition to the ecological aspects, the solid timber construction has the advantage of direct delivery of elements to the construction site and did not require any further processing. On one hand, this saved time, and on the other, the climatic advantages of solid timber construction could be exploited.

The façade consists of rear-ventilated vertical larch cladding with embedded LED strips for outdoor lighting. A notable design element is the external sun protection with light colored drop-arm awnings. These are visibly embedded in the façade and can be moved room by room. The use of the drop-arm awning system allows the windows to be used as an escape route, and also gives one the freedom to open the French doors and step out onto the free play area even when the sun protection is extended. The window frames were deliberately chosen in white as a high-contrast design element to the dark façade.

Bright and friendly rooms for the well-being of the children are created through the bright light coming in through the large windows, the natural surfaces and the choice of colors. In addition, all rooms are barrier-free accessible.

Not least, a day-care center was created that allows the little visitors to develop and grow up in a comfortable atmosphere, but also represents a clear example in terms of sustainability. Despite technical requirements, such as falling below the energy saving ordinance (EnEV 2016), the team of architects, specialist consultants and developers succeeded in creating a daycare center with a strong concept: the clear floor plan structure creates a playful characteristic in each of the rooms thanks to the special organization and the different colors.

In the future, the day-care center is planned to be expanded by two blocks of apartments. These are oriented along a climatically effective inner courtyard, which is intended to serve as a semi-public space for the residents. The apartments are each oriented to the west and east. The static grid of the day care center and the supply lines have already been planned in such a way that the expansion is possible even while the day care center is in operation.

Our follow-up project “Extension of a day-care center with apartments and parallel use” can be found here.

Die ausführende Firma Matthäus Schmid GmbH aus Baltringen hat in nur wenigen Tagen den Holzbau mit Massivholzplatten von ABA-Holz van Kempen errichtet. Das Wetter hat perfekt mitgespielt und man kann jetzt schon durch die Flure, Gruppen- und Schlafräume gehen. Als nächste erfolgt die Abdichtung des Daches und die Erstellung der Fassade.