Description

Early on in the design process for an extension to St. Benedict’s School in Ealing, London, it became clear that the 400 m² assembly hall and the 225 m² examination hall requested in the school’s brief would need to be amalgamated due to space limitations. However, instead of employing the usual solution of dividing a 400 m² hall across its width with a folding-sliding partition, architect Buschow Henley designed ‘the cloister’, a space that cleverly unites the existing campus whilst also embodying the school’s Catholic roots and values in its design.

In what the architects describe as a ‘Russian doll’ solution, for the ‘cloister’ one hall is placed inside the other. The outer hall, square in plan, sits snugly between the existing school buildings and is linked to each with a series of ramps and hallways. Within the space 28 concrete columns form another square, the examination hall. Each of the 24 openings between the piers is furnished with a set of full-height solid double doors that, during exam times, can be closed to create a self-contained room, whilst still allowing circulation between the other school buildings in the arcade that is formed around the edges. When the doors are open the whole space becomes a grand assembly hall as well as a place to accommodate transition between lessons and chance encounters, a 21st century Benedictine monastery. Thus, to provide space for occasional events such as school plays, whole school assemblies or awards ceremonies, these moving elements offer the opportunity not only to reconfigure large gathering spaces, but also to change spatial qualities according to the event or time of year.

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Originally published in: Prue Chiles (ed.), Leo Care, Howard Evans, Anna Holder, Claire Kemp, Building Schools: Key Issues for Contemporary Design, Birkhäuser, 2015.