On 22 July 2022 the jury for the art-for-architecture competition for the nursery school in Jakob-Laubach-Strasse in Mainz-Weisenau chose the proposal entitled “Der Dschungel leuchtet” and recommended implementation.
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The nursery school in Jakob-Laubach-Strasse in Mainz has adopted a theme to stimulate the children’s imagination. This theme is the jungle.
For children the jungle is not something from their daily experience but a mysterious realm in their imagination – a land of dreams, a vision. As such this theme is incorporated into the art for architecture – as a visionary apparition, a fata morgana.
The appearance of the school building is marked by cladding of vertical grey boards. At the corner of the building, this grid structure condenses into a vision of the jungle. Here the boards gradually change colour. The ubiquitous grey turns into a green jungle with a red sky as a backdrop.
The jungle is not illustrated but gently suggested. Everything remains open to the imagination. This means that an image of the jungle is not provided, but only an atmospheric impression in which all children can imagine their own jungle. The art does not anticipate this jungle of their own but merely serves as a launchpad to the imagination.
The children themselves can breathe life into the jungle. They can paint pictures and make drawings of jungle animals and jungle adventures, and can hang these pictures on the inside of the board façade. In this way they make their own contributions to the jungle. For this purpose, the boards have the colours of the jungle vision on all four sides, and consequently on the inside too.
The jungle that radiates colour at the corner of the school makes the whole building into the bearer of the jungle vision, as its appearance emerges from the board structure that surrounds the building. Thus in its entirety it functionally participates in this vision. Furthermore, the magenta-coloured tiled cladding of the building is a response to the sky above the jungle. In this way, the whole nursery school supports the vision of the jungle.