ST. CLAIR, Michigan – June 1, 2016 – Fredrikstad Waldorf School’s newest addition, which will accommodate children from grades 2 – 4 and create a new premises for the school day care facility, was recently opened by Jon-Ivar Nygård, Mayor of Fredrikstad. Located on a picturesque south facing slope and surrounded by trees the new building, clad in Kebony, is situated on the boundary between the forest and schoolyard. To preserve the natural backdrop to the play area, the building is partly placed on stilts floating above the creek to maintain the natural rock formations on the site and the flow of the little stream through the grounds.
The Waldorf School is a worldwide institution founded in Germany for ‘children from all walks of life with all kinds of gifts’. In 1979 the school opened a dependency in Fredrikstad, Norway, and now provides education for approximately 200 pupils across the Lower Glomma region. As a Waldorf school, the curriculum is based on the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, which places importance on cherishing and respecting the freedom of each individual and emphasizes the role of imagination in learning. The ethos of the school is that the intellectual, practical, and artistic development of pupils should be holistically integrated.
The lead architect, Martin Ebert of LINK Arkitektur, has created a distinctive modern building, which draws on the angular design style of traditional anthroposophical architecture. The classrooms are strikingly non-uniform, with an interesting pentagonal shape and impressive high ceilings. The design of communal areas continues this aesthetic, with large windows in bold colors along every wall. Engraved above each window is text from Goethe’s Faust, written in Morse code; this is a homage to the history of Waldorf-schools as "Faust" is integral in Rudolf Steiner's interpretation of modern learning and human growth.
For the façade, raw materials such as concrete, wood and steel are used without modification to emphasize the materials' inherent natural beauty. Kebony was chosen for the external wooden cladding to continue this natural aesthetic, but also because the subtle, dappled silver-grey patina complements and enhances the woodland setting. Kebony has strong environmental credentials in its own right, as a sustainable alternative to hardwood that reduces the demand for tropical deforestation. The patented technology enhances sustainable softwood by heating them under pressure with furfuryl alcohol, an agricultural byproduct, so that the softwoods permanently take on the attributes of tropical hardwood including high durability, hardness and dimensional stability.
“The creative freedom which the school encourages has carried through to our design, allowing us to make bold creative decisions which have led to an architecture that embodies the principles of an education that focuses on seeing pupils as children instead of students,” Martin Ebert, lead architect at Link Arkitektur commented. “We’ve focused on the natural setting of rocks, running water and forest and incorporated this into the design of the project, using natural construction materials and Kebony cladding so that the buildings appear to be a continuation of the woodland.”
“We’ve seen LINK Arkitektur use Kebony in their projects before, so we knew they would come up with a great design,” Mette Valen, Sales Manager at Kebony commented. “The new school buildings look stunning and it’s wonderful to see the ecological focus present throughout the whole project.”
Photos © Jiri Havran
Twitter: @KebonyWood @LINKarkitektur
Media Contact:
John Everette
Walker Sands Communications
T: 312-964-9102
Notes to editors:
* LINK arkitektur
LINK arkitektur is one of the leading architect offices in Scandinavia, in terms of turnover, the number of employees and the number of projects completed annually. As a business model and philosophy, LINK has chosen to let 14 offices with approximately 350 employees in Norway, Sweden and Denmark create their own culture and specialist fields.
* Kebony Technology
The Kebony technology is a patented process which enhances the properties of non-durable wood species to give them similar characteristics to the best performing woods. Through a sustainable process wood species such as pines and some non-durable hardwoods are impregnated with a bio-based liquid derived from agricultural crop waste. With the addition of heat, the furfuryl polymer is permanently grafted into the wood cell wall, resulting in greatly improved durability and dimensional stability.
*Kebony Wood
Kebony is suitable for both internal and external applications that demand high performance and great aesthetics including: decking, flooring, cladding, roofing, windows, and furniture. Over time Kebony acquires its characteristic silver-grey patina when exposed to sun and rain, whilst not losing its performance characteristics. With improved durability and dimensional stability Kebony is becoming increasingly the choice of leading architects and developers enabling them to use wood in projects without causing environmental degradation. Kebony has been used internationally in projects from commercial, public, residential and marine, for example Hunter’s Point in New York, the Mary Rose museum and both residential and commercial buildings on the UK’s seafront. A recent study by Norwegian environmental consulting firm Bergfald & Co. demonstrated that Kebony has a substantially lower carbon footprint than its tropical hardwood equivalents.
