11
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extraordinarily expensive, so now there is a suspended slab across the whole site with void forms underneath.” The slab is 325mm thick with exposed soffits. Classrooms are
on an 8m grid rising to two storeys above ground level and giving onto corridors up to 3m wide that overlook the interior well of the building. Support columns are 500 x 250mm and are hidden in the
walls, except for some larger exposed circular columns. Concrete is exposed to provide thermal mass for the building. To solve the problem of building over the boiler room to allow
a link between the two schools, BDP used “a big steel box to straddle the plant room, it was an enormous distance to span,” Hook says. This had the additional benefit of giving large column-free spaces for the sports and dining halls. Building the school between a main road – lined with mature
trees – and the old school meant that “in some places it was incredibly close, with incredibly tight pinch points,” Hook said. Although some work could be done during school holidays,
for most of the time contractor Balfour Beatty had to work around a functioning school, taking care to ensure that dust and
noise were not disruptive. The main building’s exterior is a cold rolled steel frame with
‘jumbo sized’ metal studs, as Hook puts it, “internally plaster- boarded and with a cementitious board for insulation.” On the road side there is a rainscreen, so creating a variation
in appearance around the building. Hook says: “The street frontage is more formal, and as the building turns into the grounds the exterior changes from the rainscreen and becomes softer cedar cladding at the more informal side of the school and then wraps round continuously to Samuel Rhodes, so there is the same design language for both schools.” In addition to the long side of the school, where classrooms
open onto the single main ‘street’, there are three points at which the building expands out on the playground side into ‘lozenges’ used by the library, theatre, art and technology teaching and a sixth form centre. On these, the cedar cladding used outside comes inside to
wrap around each lozenge, so bringing wood into the interior of the school. It will not, of course, weather in the way that it does outside, but provides a sudden contrast in appearance.
continued on page 13
Scaffolding on the new school
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