The musty changing room, the auditorium with its huge doors, the gym with medicine balls and blue rubber mats, the freshly polished linoleum in the school hallways, scratched tabletops, chewing gum under the wooden chairs and graffiti in the washrooms. Those who think of their school days recall images of spaces, surfaces, objects, and smells. Schoolrooms are living spaces and students spend long time and important years in them. Years in which shaping and socialization take place.

2021 we got the Georg Koppmann Preis für Hamburger Stadtfotografie and realised our project “Der Raum ist der dritte Lehrer” (The Environment as the Third Teacher). We photographed five schools in Hamburg. We were focused on the design of surfaces and materials, on the interaction and clash of colors and shapes, the attrition of objects as well as on the interior design and especially the conversion of space that develops from use and arises casually over the years.