Kéré Architecture and HK Architekten Stack a Timber Daycare into a Vertical Playground on Munich's TU Campus

Most daycare centers want a garden. The Kinderoase an der TUM had no room for one. Kéré Architecture, working with the Austrian timber specialists HK Architekten, faced a former parking lot on the Technical University of Munich campus. The plot sits between the main campus and the cafeteria, is wedged between two older buildings, and is exposed to traffic and noise. Their answer was to build up. The result is a five-level, 1,540 m² timber building for 60 children. Reception and administration sit at the base, three floors of age-grouped childcare rooms fill the middle, and the play landscape that would normally spread across the ground has moved onto the roof.

What interests us is not the stacking, which any dense city forces eventually. It is the decision to treat vertical circulation as the main event. Stairs, slides and climbing nets are where children spend their day, not something they pass through to get somewhere else. The client, who named the building for Ingeborg Pohl, wants to help young academics, especially women, combine careers with family. A daycare on campus, a short walk from the lab, makes that goal concrete in a way policy documents rarely do.

Building Upward on a Parking Lot

From above, the building reads as a compact insertion into a roofscape of hipped and pyramidal tops. Its round rooftop drum is the only gesture that announces a different program. The wooden site model makes the logic clear: a faceted tower sized to its gap, with the two plain neighbours left intact on either side.

At street level after dark, the tower holds its place between the older buildings without imitating them. The domed timber roof sits behind the parapet line, so the cornice rhythm of the street mostly survives. A five-storey building in this context could easily have looked like a bully. Here it reads more like a lantern.

A Weathering Steel Shroud

The facade combines suspended Corten slats with floor-to-ceiling glazing. This is a notable change from the 2024 proposal, which showed wooden slats. The finished building is clearly clad in rust and copper tones, and we think the switch is defensible. On a corner facing traffic, a weathering steel screen will age without maintenance, filter sightlines into rooms full of children, and soften the noise and glare of the street.

Up close at dusk, the screen does what good slat facades should. It turns opaque or transparent depending on the light. Red interior surfaces glow through the gaps and give passersby a hint of activity without exposing the children. The faceted geometry of the slats catches low sun differently on each face, which keeps a simple box from looking flat.

Circulation as a Game

Kéré calls the building a vertical playground, and the interiors back up the slogan. Curved timber tubes lined with thin wooden slats act as slides between floors. A child crawling out of one beside a red carpeted corridor is the clearest image of the idea: moving between levels has become an activity in its own right.

The skylit circular stairwell at the core goes further. Painted yellow, wrapped in rope netting and pierced with glowing moon and star cutouts, it works as both stair and climbing frame. Fire safety and acoustics were stated design priorities, and the reinforced concrete emergency stair on the south side is what makes this playful core possible. Keeping the code-compliant escape route separate frees the central drum to be fun.

Timber Rooms and the Field of the Heavens

Alpine spruce is left exposed throughout. In the classrooms you can see the timber beams, tall wood-framed windows and a curved blue built-in bench designed by the studio. Kéré says wood was chosen partly for how well it reflects light and supports natural ventilation. The atmosphere in these rooms is warm without being precious, and the furniture is clearly built to be climbed on.

The roof is called the Himmelswiese, the Field of the Heavens. It is partly covered so it can be used in most weather, with hexagonal stools, a curved enclosing wall and a netted climbing cone beneath a daylight oculus. A green clock tower rises over the parapet. Children get the sky, the wind and views across Munich, which no ground-level yard on this site could have offered.

Plans and Drawings

The early blue ink sketches show where the project began: a figure leading a line of children, with notes about university, career and family, beside a boxy tower and a tent-like roof. The plans and sections show how directly that idea was carried through. A circular stair holds the center of every floor, and the sections show the full-height void doing the spatial work between stacked rooms. The axonometric of the play floors, with yellow slides, mounds and a cave, reads almost like a landscape plan turned on its side.

Why This Project Matters

Cities are full of awkward leftover plots, and childcare is chronically short of space. The Kinderoase shows that a kindergarten does not have to be a low pavilion in a garden. A tight urban lot can work if outdoor play moves to the roof and circulation is designed as play space instead of corridor. Few daycares have tried this as fully as this one.

It also shows mass timber at a scale and in a program where it makes obvious sense. The pairing of Kéré's spatial imagination with HK Architekten's timber expertise produced a low-carbon structure that children can actually touch. Treating the building as a support for working parents, not only as a facility for children, is the point other universities should take from it.

TU Munich Kinderoase Daycare by Kéré Architecture and HK Architekten. Munich, Germany. 1,540 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Iwan Baan and Erik Jan Ouwerkerk.

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