Description
The architecturally diverse campus at Brentwood School in Brentwood, Essex, reflects its 450-year history. The latest addition of an assembly hall is overtly contemporary whilst playfully referencing the materiality and forms of the older campus. The project was conceived to support the school’s pedagogical shift to prepare pupils both toward UK A-Levels and the International Baccalaureate in their sixth form programmes. The evolution of the project involved complex negotiations with planning and conservation officers that resulted in the retention of a Victorian vicarage in the middle of the proposed site. The resulting tripartite composition is the better for the long gestation, reflecting the internal programme of learning, social areas and assembly spaces. The composition significantly impacts on the public street elevation, creating a bookend to the long string of buildings that start with the school chapel to the north. The main Edwardian school building is sat back from the road, creating a long open forecourt that is now contained by the addition of the new assembly hall.
The use of brickwork ensures a strong material continuity with the original buildings. The diaper pattern references the older buildings whilst giving a strong visual identity to the new buildings. On the classroom block the simple surface pattern wraps up the walls and continues onto the roof. The auditorium sees the diaper pattern used as a large bold relief, recessing three and half bricks deep. The multiple gables give the large block a scale that externally resembles the scale of the existing building. Internally this is used to animate the ceiling of the auditorium. The restored vicarage building’s external appearance gives little clue of the nature of the internal spaces where the strategic removal of walls has created a flowing open-plan space. The project has not only given the school a series of modern learning and teaching spaces addressing the older students but has resulted in a positive streetscape that benefits the wider urban landscape. The architecture projects the school as a place of solid educational values whilst being forward thinking and embracing change.
Drawings
Photos
Exterior view
Interior view
Originally published in: Prue Chiles (ed.), Leo Care, Howard Evans, Anna Holder, Claire Kemp, Building Schools: Key Issues for Contemporary Design, Birkhäuser, 2015.