2018

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Grundschule Berg-am-Laim, Berg-am-Laim-Str. 142, 81673 München

Weltkarte, Pigmentdruck auf Papier auf Aludibond und Weltkugel im Pausenhof

Architecture: V-Architekten GmbH, Köln

Landscape architecture: Luska Freiraum GmbH, Dachau

Photos: Stefan Müller-Naumann

Text: Florian Matzner

“Come autumn I’ll be ten, and I suppose I’ll be past my prime then,” says Pippi Longstocking on the group of islands named after her. What, from a distance, looks like a monumentally sized map of the world, upon which cavort hundreds of continents, countries, and islands, becomes, upon closer inspection, a collection of characters and personalities taken from children’s culture of recent decades—characters from literature, comics, or children’s films, like Pippi Longstocking, as well as Harry Potter or the Katzenjammer Kids, Pokemon, Heidi, and Asterix, all the way to Spiderman and Bart Simpson.

Organized into various groups according to theme, this world map of childlike imagination is inscribed into the atrium of the new wing; its height of eleven meters ensures that it can be viewed—and, most importantly, read—in detail from each of the building’s three floors. Every time, the viewer discovers something new, reveals a secret or two, gets an answer to a question, or solves a riddle.

As the new top experts in smartphone operation, schoolchildren have long since exchanged the “Diercke” International Atlas for Google Maps and road maps for the GPS in the family car. Still, as the gaze travels over and through the map of the world made by the Munich artist Stephan Huber, it goes on a journey into the thoughts and dreams of each individual child.

The big atlas in the atrium of the new wing has its counterpart on the square in front of the elementary school. Here, the artist has placed a globe, whose equatorial line is populated with a group of countries and islands, although here, children are also depicted as they run, jump, hold hands, and, according to Huber, “symbolize togetherness, communication, and friendship,” for, as the Little Prince on the map says, “… it is only with the heart that one can see rightly. …”