Education and culture center Frankfurt
The Frankfurt Education and Culture Center ( Bikuz for short ) is a building complex in the Höchst district of Frankfurt . Since 1975 it has been the seat of numerous educational and cultural institutions in the west of Frankfurt.
location
The educational and cultural center is located at the intersection of Gebeschusstrasse and Michael-Stumpf-Strasse in northwest Höchst on the border with Unterliederbach . The property extends almost to Königsteiner Strasse in the east and is bordered by Adelonstrasse in the south.
The center is well connected to public transport thanks to the Frankfurt-Höchst train station , which is directly adjacent to the south . To the north is the “Höchst Bahnhof Nordseite” bus stop, which is served by city bus routes 50 and 59 and regional bus 253.
Opposite, on the north side of Gebeschusstrasse, is the Leibniz School , a secondary school, and the 17th Frankfurt Police Station . To the west is the Höchst customs office. The rest of the area is characterized by a mixed residential development with individual houses (eastern Adelonstraße), perimeter block development (Gebeschusstraße) and housing developments (Michael-Stumpf-Straße, western Adelonstraße).
use
The main user of the education and culture center is Frankfurt's largest upper secondary school, the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium . The school totum pro parte is often referred to as the Bikuz. One reason for this could be that it was named after the physicist Friedrich Dessauer in 1982, i.e. only seven years after it was opened . Today it mainly occupies the second and third floors.
The second educational institution in the building is the Frankfurt am Main Adult Education Center (VHS). It maintains the VHS Center West with administration and classrooms on the first floor. A customer center is located on the ground floor.
Saalbau GmbH provides two halls on the ground floor for cultural use . The municipal cinema Filmforum Höchst also has its administrative headquarters in Bikuz. The sports halls are available to clubs in the area.
Finally, the Höchst Library Center, a branch of the Frankfurt City Library with around 35,000 media, and the school library of the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium are located on the ground floor .
history
The predecessor building of the Bikuz was the national education center of the Bund für Volksbildung Frankfurt am Main Höchst . It was created in 1927 from a conversion of the former Höchst Citizens' Hall. After the Bund für Volksbildung (Bund für Volksbildung) could no longer pay the maintenance for the building, it came into the municipal possession soon after the opening. After the Second World War, the United States Army confiscated the People's Education Center. In 1957 it was taken over by Saalbau GmbH . After a final renovation in 1965, the city had the building demolished.
On April 1, 1972, Frankfurt's head of school, Peter Rhein, presented the project of a “multifunctional education center” on the grounds of the Volksbildungsheim. The building should have a model character, because this form of use was unique in Germany at the time. However, the project was not without controversy. While students complained about the expected shortage of teachers, the building with its massive dimensions was considered an urban planning failure. A member of the SPD called it a “cultural prison”.
The first groundbreaking took place on October 14th of this year, a year later the topping-out ceremony for the first construction phase was celebrated, so that the upper school could start teaching on February 4th, 1975. At 46.25 million DM (adjusted for inflation today about 62 million euros), the projected construction costs of 43.6 million DM were slightly exceeded.
The number of pupils at the secondary school soon exceeded the capacity of the Bikuz, which was designed for 900 pupils. An extrapolation showed that the number of students in 1986 would peak at 1800 and then fall again. As a measure, the construction of an extension building was arranged so that it can be dismantled again when the usage decreases. After a year of construction, the so-called IPI building was built on what was then the Sporthof, the architecture of which is similar to other school outbuildings in Frankfurt from this period.
The last renovation of the building took place on October 20, 2003. Mainly the concrete facade was renewed and aluminum windows were replaced by wood-aluminum windows. In addition, an asbestos remediation had to be carried out. This work was only intended to be the first step in a comprehensive renovation, as a result of which energy costs should also be reduced (electricity costs alone amounted to € 320,000 in 2002).
architecture
The first building (1975-2007)
Exterior and development
The building from 1975 corresponded in its compact design and the predominant rectangular shapes of the architecture of the 1960s. When the foundation stone was laid, it was mockingly referred to as "Kubiz". It was constructed as a reinforced concrete frame structure with an external facade.
The building was divided into three overlapping cubes. The main part of the building was located on the long side facing Gebeschusstrasse. It was about 100 meters long and 50 meters wide. The eaves height sloped down on the long sides and was two stories high towards Gebeschusstrasse. The roof areas on these low-tier areas were used as terraces . In the middle of the building, this part of the building, including the technical floor, comprised five floors. Inside were facilities of central importance.
The entrances in this part of the building were also at the intersections with the other parts of the building. The main entrance was in the northeast area on Gebeschusstraße. Behind a five-step staircase, a small forecourt opened to the street, which was already inside the building, but was supplied with light through an opening in the roof. The entrance from the direction of Michael-Stumpf-Straße was on the south side of the central cube. Inside there was a small foyer that divided the flow of visitors into the individual building sections. In contrast to the north entrance, this was barrier-free . The access to the street was ensured by an elongated forecourt sloping down to the sidewalk, which was limited on the one hand by the building and on the other hand by a wall leading to the underground car park entrance. There were arcades on the building side. The forecourt was equipped with benches and raised beds.
To the east connected to this cube is a flatter section that contains the large sports hall . This part was integrated into the new building from 2009, so it still exists today with a slightly different look. The third part of the building cut the south facade of the central cube and was roughly in the middle. It had an almost square footprint with a side length of around 50 × 50 meters and, including the technical floor, was five stories high. It contained the majority of the classrooms at the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium .
There was an underground car park under the building complex , which had its entrance to Michael-Stumpf-Strasse. The parking spaces were intended exclusively for employees and separated by a rolling grille, while the bicycle and scooter parking spaces were public.
The vertical building access was made possible by three staircases. The largest staircase was in the main cube and was accessible from the foyer of the south entrance. A passenger elevator ran in the middle of the U-shaped staircase. Two more simple staircases were located in the square teaching cube, of which the western one had its own entrance to the forecourt on Michael-Stumpf-Straße. Contrary to the customary convention in Germany, the floors were numbered from the ground floor.
The facade of the Bikuz was structured strictly horizontally by ribbon windows. The impression was reinforced by the continuation of the bands with a different surface color. Up until the renovation in 2004, three different surfaces were used: untreated concrete as the base surface, colored paint on the ribbon windows, and exposed aggregate concrete on the stairwells, technical floors and terrace borders. For the renovation, the exposed aggregate concrete facade was sanded and painted in the new basic color light gray. The continuations of the ribbon windows were set off in a darker gray.
Interior construction
Inside the building, the division into three cubes continued. The teaching cube was partially flexible in use. The windowless middle section was available as open space on some floors and separated into rooms on other floors. On the ground floor in the main cube were the already mentioned entrance foyers, the cafeteria with a separate dining area for teachers, a small and large hall, the administration of the adult education center and three smaller sports halls. In addition to property management, the teaching cube also included the specialist rooms and the art collection of the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium (FDG). The first floor was divided into the library center of the city library in the main cube and the school library and general classrooms in the teaching cube. On the second floor in the main cube there was a small and a large teacher's room and VHS rooms. In the teaching cube, general classrooms and the specialist rooms for music and the rehearsal room for the performing game were again housed. On the third floor, the school administration of the FDG and rooms of the VHS were housed, on the other hand, there were the specialist rooms for the natural sciences biology, physics and chemistry as well as their collections and preparation rooms. A small television studio for the video company was also housed there. The top floor was used exclusively as a technical floor.
The New Bikuz (2009)
Exterior and development
The new Bikuz is based on a square floor plan and has four floors throughout. The sports hall of the old building, which has only been changed slightly from the outside, is attached to the new building.
The most striking element of the exterior design is the new main entrance to the building. It is located on the west side, i.e. on Michael-Stumpf-Straße, roughly the same place where the previous building had its access area. The facade along the entrance area is completely glazed over all floors and is set back about five meters from the rest of the facade. Because the roof of the Bikuz follows the square floor plan, a covered forecourt is created in front of the entrance, which is delimited by three columns. A second entrance is on the northeast side. A small covered forecourt connects this entrance with the entrance of the sports hall building. Both entrance areas are accented with a strong shade of red. The rest of the facade is divided into the ground floor and upper floors. While the ground floor is designed in a dark gray tone and with almost floor-to-ceiling windows or doors, the upper floors are kept in white and divided horizontally with continuous ribbon windows. The large hall is an exception: in addition to the ground floor, it also occupies the first floor, which is why the north facade is also dark gray and has no windows.
In the middle of the building is a small triangular courtyard, the space of which increases upwards. It enables the interior rooms to be supplied with natural light. The building is accessed vertically via three stairwells in the southwest, northeast and northwest of the building. Two of the stairwells are supplemented with elevators. There is an underground car park under the building complex, the entrance to which is between the entrances to the main building and the sports hall and can be reached from Gebeschusstraße.
Interior construction
The school and city library, the cafeteria, the two halls of Saalbau GmbH and the property management are located on the ground floor. The tube-like rooms around the inner courtyard are used as a foyer . From this a representative staircase leads to a gallery on the first floor. Like the rest of the upper floors, the first floor is mainly intended for use by the VHS and Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium. Next to it are the administrative rooms of the VHS and the Filmforum Höchst. The northern part of the building is not accessible on this floor, as it is the upper part of the two two-story halls.
The two top floors are almost identical. There are rooms behind the outer and inner courtyard façades, which are accessed through a continuous corridor. At the corners of the building there are smaller common areas with lockers. However, the use of the rooms differs. On the second floor there are general classrooms for language and social sciences, art and music, as well as a rehearsal room for performing games and a television studio. The school management and the teachers' room are also on this floor. The third floor, on the other hand, is reserved for the natural sciences and computer science. There you will find the somewhat larger lecture halls and laboratories for biology, physics and chemistry and their collections and preparation rooms as well as three computer rooms.
swell
- ^ Frankfurt am Main: Höchst Library Center
- ↑ Hans-Otto Schembs: From the hall to the town houses . The history of Saalbau-Aktiengesellschaft and Saalbau GmbH in Frankfurt am Main. Ed .: Saalbau GmbH. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-7829-0382-X .
- ↑ a b Jubilee CD-Rom 25 years of Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium
- ^ A5 Planning GmbH - Comprehensive renovation measures for the BIKUZ educational culture center in Frankfurt. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 18, 2009 ; Retrieved September 14, 2009 .
- ^ Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium - yearbook 2004
Web links
- Education and Culture Center Frankfurt at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the city of Frankfurt am Main
- Website of the VHS Frankfurt
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 16.3 " N , 8 ° 32 ′ 33.3" E