Description

The design incorporates departmental teaching areas arranged as clearly articulated colour coded mini-buildings or ‘cells’ in their own right. Each department is formed and enclosed by its own walls yet, at the same time, remains part of a coherent whole. The school classrooms and social study cell is clad in bright yellow painted steel panels, a gym block is picked out in brownish red panels, the science/technical workshop department is in grey cladding panels. A grand triple-height glazed canopy identifies the entrance or threshold to each of the three departments. This provides a further ordering device within this highly legible architectural composition.

Between the five blocks there is a three-storey high fully glazed central ’atrium’ area, which not only acts as the main circulation route between departments, but also becomes a reference point for the social life of the school as a whole. It is a place where students meet by chance on the staircases and ramps running around and between each level and the various specialist teaching areas; the galleries and balconies which surround the atrium are used as break-out zones with computer and power access for study and smaller social groups outside the classrooms; the school’s main canteen and dining area spreads out across the ground floor of the atrium to provide a vibrant social heart for the community, serviced by an adjacent kitchen. As staff and students rise up through the floors, they can look down and across to maintain visual contact with all parts of the institution.

The teaching departments consist in the main of traditional cellular classrooms, however, there is a strong emphasis on open-plan learning spaces, with three large homebase areas at the heart of each of the academic teaching blocks. These areas provide a variety of workspaces, together with storage areas for pupils, washrooms and a teacher’s office; they give students a more intimate homebase area for each age range, and also open up the possibility for team teaching in a variety of forms. Each part of the building is clearly articulated yet slots effortlessly into the whole. Entire departments can be quickly identified through highly glazed components, which wrap the main central core areas, providing excellent visibility. This sense of transparency enables students to be visible, and at the same time it promotes a sense of awareness of the user’s own position within the building, whether it is on the ground floor or in the open galleries at the top of the building. It gives a sense of belonging to individual departments and the excitement of an adult environment where the next lesson is enhanced by the experience of built form; students can almost always see which part of the development they will be heading for next. The sense of order, which comes through this controlled use of colour and materiality, makes this an exemplar of the new architecture for schools.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.