Max Otto Zitzelsberger collaborates with university students on barn-like teaching building in Germany

Architect Max Otto Zitzelsberger worked with students from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau to create the Learning House, a barn-like teaching building in Bavaria with an exposed timber structure.

Located in Freilandmuseum Oberpfalz, an open-air museum displaying the history of rural life in the area, the Learning House replaces a former farm building that was lost in a fire with a new space for the teaching of environmental education.

The project grew out of a research project at the Department of Tectonics in Timber Construction at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, where Max Otto Zitzelsberger works as an assistant professor.

Looking to provide an alternative to the historic buildings and reconstructions found on the site, the team's design offers a contemporary take on rural barns, informed by several "quirky" extensions that had been made to the former farm building.

"It is novel in this museum to integrate a completely new building next to the historic ones, but we wanted to make explicit the difference between old and new, and also the artificial construction of this place," Zitzelsberger told Dezeen.

"The form of the building is contradictory – between tradition and renewal, continuation and interruption, clear and unclear, contextual and acontextual."

"The peculiar extension is still reminiscent of the quirky extensions of the previous building, but does not try to imitate them," he added.

Currently standing as a simple timber shell, the Learning House is viewed as a continuous work-in-progress, with new additions being made when budget becomes available and a fabric facade cover protecting the building in the meantime.

Perched slightly above the ground on concrete supports, the three-storey timber structure was constructed using wood from a nearby forest, which was cut on-site before being dried for two years.

These timber columns and beams, along with an infill of oriented strand board (OSB) panels have been left exposed throughout the entire building, referencing the exposed timber frames of the three adjacent farm buildings.

"The new building is somewhat reminiscent of a historic farmhouse, but the floor plan shows a completely different typology. There is no nested arrangement of small chambers and corridors. There are just two seminar rooms and a central spiral staircase," Zitzelsberger told Dezeen.

Inside, the open seminar spaces overlook a courtyard at the centre of the historic farm buildings through large openings, while on the other elevations of the Learning House are smaller circular and geometric openings.

The main barn form is topped by a large gabled metal roof, while two smaller rectilinear volumes that protrude at angles from the western side are topped by gently sloping roofs.

Also in Bavaria, German practice Lux Architect and Spanish studio Cánovas Arquitectura created an angular timber home.

Elsewhere in Germany, students from the University of Stuttgart made use of self-shaping timber and woven flax to create an experimental tower and pavilion as part of a garden festival in Wangen im Allgäu.

The photography is by Sebastian Schels.

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