In 1984 Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson at the Bartlett, University College London, published The Social Logic of Space. Their claim was that a building is first a pattern of relations between rooms, and only then a shape. Every architect who has walked a school corridor at the 10 o’clock break knows this. It is also the best way to read the week’s Swiss school news.

In the Aula of the Oberstufenzentrum Schwarzenburg, ten anonymous school designs hang on the walls until 28 October (Mon–Fri 18:00–20:00, Sat/Sun 09:00–12:00). One of them, «Merel», won. According to the Gemeinde Schwarzenburg, the jury of municipal, school and expert representatives recommended it unanimously for further development. The authors are soppelsa architekten GmbH, Zürich, with the landscape architects Chaves Biedermann of Basel, whose outdoor spaces the councillors’ praise also names. The call drew 40 applications, and ten teams were shortlisted, two of them Nachwuchsteams. Planteam S AG of Bern and Luzern ran the procedure, and the jury met in August 2026.

The municipality judged the school on how it will be used. Councillors Anja Pflugshaupt and Barbara Mischler: «Merel verbindet eine klare Gebäudestruktur mit gut nutzbaren Lern- und Aussenräumen.» OSZ head Simon Grünert set the bar further out: «Unser Ziel ist eine Schule, die unterschiedliche Lernformen ermöglicht und auch für kommende Generationen funktioniert.»

←TODAY: A Bernese municipality spends CHF 435,000 to choose one school out of ten anonymous entries. →3012: The schools still working in the 2070s are the ones whose room relations were right on the day of the jury. Fulcrum: The programme outlives the facade, so a jury that judges usable rooms is judging the century.

The process behind it is a Swiss one. Renovation options were studied from 2019, and a large majority of the assembly backed a new building in a 2024 consultative vote. In 2025 the assembly approved CHF 435,000 just for the competition. As Baublatt reports, the current financial plan puts the total at about CHF 20 million. The planning credit is expected in June 2027, the construction credit goes to the ballot box in 2028, building starts in 2029 and pupils move in in summer 2031, each step subject to approval. The brief asks for contemporary teaching, room for the library and the Tagesschule, a good fit with the surroundings, and a reserve site for a future triple sports hall.

A practice built on school briefs

The brothers Mario and Nino Soppelsa founded the office in 2012, and its first built work was a semi-detached house in Esslingen in 2015. Quart Publishers’ monograph (Anthologie 54, edited by Heinz Wirz, with an essay by Elias Baumgarten, 2024) describes the work as centred on the relationship between the spaces and the project programme. You can see that in Oberrüti. Its dual gymnasium, selected for best architects 23, is set into the slope so that the entrance sits level with the new schoolyard. The section serves the children’s route, not the other way round.

The office’s own news log reads like a school-building craft at work: groundbreaking for the OSZ Ins in March 2025, first prize for Ruggenacher 2 in Regensdorf in May 2025 (overall credit approved June 2026), the Unterer Dammbühl school in Wängi opened in December 2025 and chosen for best architects 27, and now Schwarzenburg. Any office that has hung its boards in a village Aula knows what such a run takes.

The trade-off is plain. The anonymous competition is the fairest door a young office gets, and also the costliest per hour: ten teams draw a school, and one builds it.

Atelier: An office that lives on public schools competes on how well it reads a Raumprogramm, and it should treat that reading as a method it can repeat, not as instinct. AI tools can now summarise a long brief in minutes, which makes it more important, not less, that the team writes its own reading down. Monday move: before anyone opens a plan, put the brief’s room programme on one sheet as an adjacency diagram and pin it next to the jury criteria.

Hack: Rank the rooms of a school brief by how central they sit before you draw a single wall. Write the brief’s required adjacencies as pairs and let closeness centrality show which room the plan has to organise around. The library and the Tagesschule from Schwarzenburg’s brief go straight in.

import networkx as nx
G = nx.Graph([("Klasse","Gruppenraum"),("Klasse","Halle"),("Bibliothek","Halle"),("Tagesschule","Aussenraum"),("Halle","Aussenraum")])
for room, c in sorted(nx.closeness_centrality(G).items(), key=lambda x: -x[1]): print(f"{room:12} {c:.2f}")

PAZ Takeaway: For a practice that wins on programme, PAZ could turn that one-sheet adjacency diagram into Archicad zones through the PAZ Grasshopper↔Archicad Library. The room relations the jury judged would then stay checkable from the competition model through to the execution model.

Take your current brief, draw its room relations on one sheet before Friday, and bring that sheet, not a sketch, to the first team meeting.