Description

This 26 place (full time equivalent) nursery was designed in close collaboration with the local community. It incorporates a large playroom which is divided into dedicated activity zones (for wet play, art, reading and manipulative play) with a self-contained quiet room, a child-accessible kitchen, and a children’s washroom. It has its own entrance lobby controlled by a new secure office/meeting room. There is a large covered outside play area which is expressed architecturally as a natural extension of the building’s form. This is appropriate as the inside/outside dimension is viewed as being critical to the educational curriculum here at Briar Hill School.

The architectural concept by Peter Haddon Architects emerged from the modelling of children’s building blocks. This gives it an interesting external form, and this distinctive blockish form is accentuated by the use of contrasting zinc and copper cladding. The internal areas have lots of spatial variety, with different height ceilings in tune with both the scale of small children and their diverse patterns of play. For example, the main play area has a high ceiling, whereas the dedicated quiet room is low and intimate. Bathrooms are also low in scale, whereas the external canopy tapers out across the covered area providing a large space appropriate to its outdoor setting. The completely level floor between the inside and the outside makes a unified landscape for play.

Materials used on the outside are intended to emphasise the blockish qualities of the building’s form. Main elements are clad in turquoise zinc panels, with white render to the entrance lobby block. The covered canopy on the rear garden side is a filigree-thin plane of timber panelling (to its underside) with distinctive coloured lights which provide a warm glow to the area on even the darkest, most overcast of days. The jointing of materials is crisply and deliberately expressed, perhaps to enable children to ‘read’ the construction, so that it becomes a lesson in its own right.

This building departs from the conventional square or rectangular shape common to many school and early years buildings. Although attached to the existing building from the 1960s (to which it is physically connected by way of a short covered link), the new structure is a signature statement which reflects a progressive attitude towards the school as a whole. The new nursery is the first thing visitors see on entering the site, and with its striking form and unusual use of materials it is a dramatic architectural statement, which acts as a reminder of the importance of young children within the community.

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