32 PROJECT REPORT: EDUCATION & RESEARCH FACILITIES
ABOVE
The building has a set of five gable ends to both south (pictured) and north elevations
ABOVE RIGHT
The cloister colonnade provides a new connection to the existing building, adjacent to the refurbished Parent/Teacher Hub
Education Centre at the Eden Project, won the competition in collaboration with Blue Forest, Design & Build contractors, who originally specialised in treehouses. The design aimed to solve several problems as well as uniting art and science in greatly improved accommodation, it would also resolve other issues on the site such as circulation, as part of a wider masterplan.
No internal corridors At the project’s initiation in January 2016, the hope of the school’s then headmaster, Michael Wilson, was to avoid internal circulation as part of his drive to create a building which embraced its surroundings. Jerry Tate tells ADF that having been raised in Africa, the headmaster “couldn’t stand internal corridors.” His upbringing had given him a love of being able to quickly access the outside environment, and his inspiration was African ‘Safari Lodges’ – straightforward timber buildings often with pitched roofs, terraces, and exposed structural elements.
Form
The new arts and science building is located in the middle of the school, forming its new ‘heart’, as the missing link in the plan. Circulation is entirely external – at ground level there is a path to the north, and a new cloister-style colonnade created to the south
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– at first floor, a deep timber terrace overlooks the cricket pitch. The colonnade connects to existing circulation, enabling pupils to walk to lessons under cover but without disappearing into internal corridors as was the case in the former ‘temporary’ building on the site. The building also has a full height void giving permeability and access through from north to south. The new building’s 20 metre-deep, 30 metre-long form is in some senses a very simple construction, a two storey, glulam-framed and Siberian larch-clad building which greatly improves the school’s built presence in its context. Its volume has been broken down by being folded into five gable ends – seen as more child-friendly by the architects than one monolithic form, as well as being appropriate for the local vernacular.
The roof is formed of exposed glulam
trusses “leaning into each other,” says project architect Andrew Baker-Falkner – they are diagonally oriented and attached to the beams via grey-coated steel plates, creating large triangles. A sense of lightness is given by the fact that the plates hold the whitewashed trusses a few centimetres clear of the beams. Jerry Tate comments: “We really wanted a simple building which would work hard for the school, doing lots of different jobs.”
ADF DECEMBER 2018
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