The Kreuzbau (also Klassenkreuz) is a building type for school buildings in Hamburg. Between 1957 and 1963, Kreuzbau buildings were erected there at a good 60 locations of state schools. They have four wings on a cruciform ground plan, from which the name is derived. The Kreuzbau building has three floors and a flat roof. Each floor has four classrooms and associated small group rooms, which means that the Kreuzbau building can accommodate twelve school classes. The classrooms are directly accessed by a central staircase - without a corridor and in the way of Schustertyp. The design for the Kreuzbau building came from the Hamburg building director Paul Seitz. The main advantage of this type of building was its rapid assembly; from today's perspective, its disadvantage is its lack of thermal insulation. More than 80% of the Kreuzbau buildings erected in Hamburg are still standing and mostly serve elementary schools as classrooms.
History
Antecedents After the end of World War II, almost half of Hamburg's former 463 school buildings were no longer usable: 21% of the schools were destroyed and 26% were so badly damaged that they could hardly be used. From 1945 to 1947, the number of students in Hamburg doubled from 95,000 to 186,000. The reasons for this increase were the return of families from the 1943 evacuation after the "Feuersturm," including students returning from the "Kinderlandverschickung." The settlement of 1944–50 flight and expulsion of Germans and refugees from the Soviet occupation zone had a reinforcing effect. Until 1948, school construction was limited to makeshift repairs of damage and the use of shacks and other temporary facilities. The shortage of space could only be met by "shift teaching." This situation generated considerable public pressure, since parents' gainful employment was severely hampered by staggered shift teaching of several children. In Hamburg's state politics, the shortage of space in schools was, along with the housing shortage, the irritant par excellence and contributed to the SPD's loss of its majority in the 1953 Hamburg elections, even though top candidate Max Brauer promised the completion of one new school per month in the election program "A flourishing Hamburg." The winner of the 1953 elections was the bourgeois Hamburg Block, which used the issue of the lack of school buildings to stop the school reform pushed by the SPD. But that did not change the urgent task of multiplying the pace of school construction. At the same time, however, the city's resources were limited - there were enough other expensive tasks in housing construction and industrial settlement. In 1952, Paul Seitz was appointed First Director of Construction and Head of the Structural Engineering Office in Hamburg, and thus also Deputy to the Senior Director of Construction at the Hamburg Building Authority, Werner Hebebrand. Seitz held these posts until 1963, when he left Hamburg for a professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts. Seitz designed mainly schools, university buildings and other public buildings during his ten-year tenure. For schools, he relied entirely on serial designs that were used according to the modular principle. In doing so, he pursued two concepts: the "Green School" and the "wachsenden Schule." The Green School was intended to realize ideas of the new education movement of a return to nature by placing smaller school buildings with a maximum of two stories on generously sized school grounds in the green, ideally with direct access to the garden from the classroom. This type of construction deliberately stood out from the imposing "school barracks" of the Wilhelminism Period and was intended to appear transparent and light. The dimensions of these buildings were to have a human scale, a deliberate contrast to the old school buildings in which a "whole generation was drilled in racial ideological and militaristic values." It is true that school construction was not the focus of Nazi architecture, since hardly any new schools were planned and completed between 1933 and 1945. However, the new school buildings were also intended to express a turning away from the secondary virtues that had made the Nazi state and world war possible. The "wachsenden Schule" was to be available quickly and then grow with the needs of the school. Initially, this concept also called for school buildings to be easily relocatable, and was accompanied by the abandonment of costly foundations and basements. The first series of pavilion schools was built in Hamburg according to this concept; a much-noted prototype for this type of construction at the time is the listed Mendelssohnstraße school in Bahrenfeld. The serial construction developed in the process was the pavilion type A, made of lightweight materials by Polensky & Zöllner. By 1961, 459 new classrooms of this type had been erected.
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