The sports and play edge in use: table tennis tables on the grass under a flowering cherry, a basketball court in the distance and the sports hall to the right.

Where Generations Unite

Kleinpaschleben, Germany · 2024

Kleinpaschleben had an elementary school. The school closed. What it left behind was a sports hall that still worked, a school building that no longer did, and 16,000 square metres of ground between them with nothing asked of it.

The site is a wedge held inside the village: roads along the south and east, houses backing onto the north and west, and the Dorfanger, the old village green, just beyond the south-west corner. The ground was already at the centre of things. It had simply stopped being for anybody.

The brief was to turn that ground into a community centre, under the motto Healthy Together Living. The harder question was what would bring anyone to it, because a community centre in a village this size cannot advertise. It gets its visitors from people who were walking past anyway and decided to come in.

One route does most of the work. The activity lane starts at the main entrance, runs past the sports hall and the courts, opens out at the event grounds and the social meeting place, and ends in woodland. Most of what happens on the site happens on the lane or just off it, so nobody has to understand the plan to find their way around.

The scheme has two authors. We drew it with David Baah Oduro, from the site analysis through to the last sheet, and every surface on it was settled between us.

Location: Kleinpaschleben, Germany
Context: Master’s semester project, Hochschule Anhalt
Disciplines: Landscape
Role: Co-author, whole scheme
With: David Baah Oduro, landscape architect
Site area: 16,000 m²
Status: Design complete

Masterplan of the scheme set into the surrounding village: an activity lane looping through the green, with playground, outdoor gym, mini football and basketball to one side, event grounds and a social meeting place at the entrance, and around the edges a mixed woodland forest, quiet area, gardening plots, two bird hotels, and a pollination station with a bee hotel beside it. — The masterplan. Sport and play sit at the entrance end, where the hall already made noise: basketball, table tennis, mini football, the playground and the outdoor gym. Past a semi-quiet band the ground goes over to mixed woodland, a quiet area, gardening plots, two bird hotels, and a pollination station with the bee hotel beside it.

The main entrance from the street: a stone-faced boundary wall with railings and a flowering cherry behind it, the three-storey former school building with a pitched tiled roof, and the pink dyed-concrete activity lane running in through the gate, with a child, an older woman with a walking stick, a man in a wheelchair and a cyclist arriving. — The main entrance, where the activity lane starts. Nothing on the site that still worked was removed: the sports hall keeps its job, and the school building beyond takes a new one.

The social meeting place: a pink dyed-concrete path curving between birch trees and lawn, a lighter path branching toward the Dorfanger, circular planters with flowering shrubs in the distance, timber tiered seating to the right, and people walking a dog, taking photographs and picnicking on a blanket. — The social meeting place, with the path out toward the Dorfanger.

What to notice

The trees thin as you go in. Around the edge they are planted densely, a belt that closes the ground off from the roads on two sides and the houses backing onto the other two. Toward the middle they thin out, until the event grounds and the social meeting place sit in the open with only scattered canopy over them.

That is a sightline, not a picture. A space meant for everybody has to be one you can see across: a parent needs to watch a child from a bench, and somebody arriving on their own needs to see who is already there before deciding to walk in. The belt does the screening at the boundary so that the middle does not have to.

The quiet zone pavilion: an undulating timber slatted canopy on posts climbed by red ivy, over a ring of curved timber seating where a man in a wheelchair sits, reached by a pale trail through long grass and dense shrubs under mature trees, with an older man walking along the trail in the foreground. — The pavilion in the quiet zone, where the mixed woodland trail ends. The trail is laid in bark chips.

The quiet end of the scheme: raised planting beds edged in woven willow, ornamental grasses and butterflies in the foreground, a timber shelter and a play structure beyond, and an older man walking the activity lane with two sticks. — Raised beds edged in woven willow. Someone who came for company and someone who came to be left alone can both be on the site at once, without either having to go somewhere else.

Detail plan naming every surface: woodland trail in bark chips, activity lane in dyed concrete falling at 1.5 per cent, event grounds in interlocking bricks, playground in poured-in-place rubber, a concrete art platform, an arboretum either side and a cedarwood bird hotel. — Every surface named and the fall on each one written down: dyed concrete on the lane, bark chips on the woodland trail, interlocking bricks on the event grounds, poured-in-place rubber on the playground.

Rainwater management diagram over the site plan: blue arrows show surface water running across the site with the existing slope, blue dashed outlines mark suggested water collection areas, and purple dashed lines mark roof water collection channels from the buildings, with the surrounding village drawn in outline. — Where the water goes. Surface water follows the existing slope to suggested collection areas, and roof water is channelled off the buildings to them; across the soft ground it goes in where it falls rather than into a pipe.

A long section across the whole scheme, running from the entrance and its pink cherry blossom tree, past the platform and the social meeting space, through seating and the event grounds to the activity lane, with the ground falling gently away to the right. — The lane is dyed concrete laid to a 1.5 per cent fall, with no steps on it. Accessibility was the brief’s priority: the surface an eighty-year-old crosses without thinking is the same surface that takes a pram, a wheelchair and a child on a scooter. The fall matters as much, because a level surface that holds water is not accessible in November.

Where this stops being true

None of this is built, and the part that matters most is not landscape at all. The scheme is designed to bring people to a community centre inside a school building that has yet to be given its new use. If that use does not arrive, the ground is a good park beside a closed school, and these drawings describe a route to somewhere nobody is going.

Accessibility is a condition rather than a construction. The lane has no steps for as long as somebody keeps it that way. Ground freezes here, and a surface that settles or lifts by twenty millimetres has a step in it for anyone on wheels. In winter, whoever owns the ground has to clear and grit a strip of roughly 1.20 metres by seven in the morning, so for those months the route in these drawings is as wide as somebody with a shovel decided to make it.

And the school closed for a reason. A village loses its elementary school when there are not enough children to fill it, and this scheme puts a playground, an outdoor gym and a mini football pitch on the school’s old grounds. It is drawn for the generations still here and for the ones that might come back. Only one of those is a fact.

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