Monumental and as austere as an archaic temple, the new vocational school is located at the entrance to Baden. Its architecture reveals very little of the building’s purpose to those passing by.

In its formal abstraction, the school could also be an office, laboratory or even a residential building. The architectural expression is coloured by the summation of concrete columns, whose interstices are filled in with glass. The classrooms are – contrary to popular convention – not positioned on the facade but are concentrated at the core. It opens up in the middle like a colonnade over the full length of the building along the windows. Architects: Burkard Meyer Architekten BSA, Baden (2006) Photographer: Roger Frei, Zurich