The old wooden town in the heart of Hanko has always held the Swedish-speaking schools. In 1898 the woold-built Hangö Samlyceum (now Hangö Gymnasium), designed by Selim A. Lindqvist, was completed. In the comprehensive school reform of the 1970s, this became the comprehensive secondary and senior secondary school. The assignment comprised the planning of the block next to the school: the new buildings there, with the existing school, had to provide space for three parallel classes for a total of just over 300 pupils.

The partly two-storey Art Nouveau building of Hangö Gymnasium is set strictly in the mainline of the street but is much larger than the other buildings around it. The extension, designed by Osmo Lappo and Tapio Raij, was not to upset this relationship. The school facilities were placed in separate buildings on the same scale as the older buildings in the block. The street between the old and new school complexes was removed and made part of the grounds. The new buildings were set around a central courtyard, and a forecourt shared by the old and new buildings was formed in the southern corner on Koulukatu. The new canteen building was finished in 1980, the other buildings in 1985.

Preserving the original character of the old school and making only the minimum of alterations meant that the special classes included in the room programme had to be placed in the new complex. The rooms for art, commercial subject, home economics and textile crafts were placed in a separate building, as were technical crafts and the heating unit for the whole school complex. The partly two-storey building on Koulukatu houses the administration, general classrooms and rooms for physics/chemistry and geography/biology.The new buildings have a reinforced concrete frame. The elevations are wood clad, and the roofs are in sheet metal. Inside, the walls are in sand-lime brick, the floors mainly linoleum and the ceilings in the corridors and classrooms suspended mineral wool.

Source: Finnish Architectural Review 6/1986