Lyceé Technique, Bel-Val.

Lockers with a difference

In the vast majority of cases, in schools, public buildings and swimming pools, they serve a very mundane purpose: to keep clothes, footwear and other things clean and safe. At one Luxembourg technical academic secondary school, everything is different: here, lockers form an integral part of the learning environment.

Schäfer lockers and the Lycée Technique Mathias Adam in Belval – that's its own special story. The building contractor, Le Fonds Belval, is developing a seemingly fantastic new city in an industrial wasteland, with outstanding architecture for living and working. When the accompanying school was rebuilt in the southernmost Luxembourg region of Pétange in 2005, the architecture firm Jim Clemes (www.clemes.lu) placed special emphasis on the architectural integration of buildings and facilities with the teaching and learning of the students and teachers within.

This applied, of course, not only to the architectural style and the outer shell of the building, but also to the interior. More than 1,800 students a day are located in the school, with more than 210 teachers – making purely functional labyrinths of lockers for this amount of people – as is usually done – was out of the question for the architecture firm. They teamed up with the graphic design firm Vitale Design (www.vitale-design.com) and the experts from Schäfer Trennwandsysteme and jointly developed a plan for integrating the locker systems into the overall concept.

The result was spectacular, striking motif walls that both grab attention and serve as a constant source of inspiration for current and future generations of students – and fulfil their functional purpose as well, of course, quite by the by. The scientist Marie Curie also graces the surfaces of the GVKF13 lockers, as does Apple founder Steve Jobs – but also scenes from the Belval region, as well as abstract motifs from the word of science and learning. Instead of a string of lockers, a complete work of art has thus come into being, which adorns the walkways and halls of the school.

The sometimes complex motifs presented a special challenge for the  locker designers from Schäfer Trennwandsysteme. They had to be very precisely matched to the joins of the lockers, so that the overall picture could come perfectly into its own. The variously coloured spaces had to align perfectly with the overall architecture, and at the same time make it easy for the students to orientate themselves.

The lockers of the Lycée Technique Mathias Adam in Belval – a functional and visual masterpiece – manufactured by Schäfer Trennwandsysteme from Horhausen in the Westerwald.