Description

Haverstock Associates have designed a handsome special needs school on a confined urban site in one of East London’s poorest neighbourhoods. With Commercial Road, an urban motorway, to the south and railway lines closing in around the other boundaries, the architects have created a calm oasis for up to 300 staff supporting the needs of a maximum 90 pupils who have severe physical and learning difficulties. The secret ingredient has been the use of an unusual Y shaped section which enables solid enclosure to the interior without compromising on natural light and ventilation.

The confined site certainly imposed a discipline on the planning of the building with a particularly deep plan form adopted in order to provide all the accommodation required without going to two storeys. The rooms are organised in three elongated blocks orientated east and west. These rooms are serviced by two internal corridors both of which have high level natural light and ventilation. Key to understanding the spatial richness of this building is the cross-sectional arrangement of inward sloping roofs and exposed steel trusses of varying height which provide low-scale cozy spaces where required, in sensory and practical teaching spaces and the library for example, and high bright areas in the hydrotherapy pool and hall/dining room.

Classrooms or homebase areas are in the external wings with two main bathroom blocks wedged between the two east- and west-facing wings of accommodation. External play areas are accessible directly from each classroom with an interesting range of hard play zones supporting classroom activities. The main entrance off Brunton Place allows pupils to be escorted into the building through a secure control point. There is a sense of transparency around the school which aids supervision for staff, without ever allowing it to become over-bearing.

Throughout the building there is a sense of structural clarity, with marked attention to the quality of circulation spaces. The structural framework is articulated clearly with columns located as free-standing points of orientation within corridors and rooms, rather than being integrated and hidden within the wall planes. Clearly the designers decided to make the structure do as much work as possible, with the end result a sophisticated building for tactile as well as visual stimulation, which encourages a sense of adventure amongst its users. This is a building for children and staff to move around in, rather than being confined within their homebase areas.

The plan form makes the building intelligible to children, not just because it is simple and straightforward in its basic organisational form, but also because natural daylight is filtered and reflected through into every room mainly at high level. This provides aural and acoustic clues for many of those children with limited sight and hearing without compromising on security and privacy.

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