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PROJECT REPORT: EDUCATION & RESEARCH FACILITIES
“We look at the whole school and how it connects rather than a separate unit” Clara Garriga, Holmes Miller
floors and classrooms.”
Despite the initial brief being for four classrooms, the idea of opening up and connecting the space meant the final design resulted in an open plan space with no doors, glazed screens between spaces and a void connecting the ground floor and first floor. “You can really see everything that’s happening everywhere in the building,” Garriga says. “It makes it feel like one unit rather than four separate classrooms.” These open areas offer versatile teaching environments and create a visual connection across the various spaces.
Although Holmes Miller has plenty of experience designing primary schools, Garriga says the Sciennes extension required a different approach, which led to benefits. “Normally when we look at a school we look at the whole school and how it connects rather than a separate unit – it was quite interesting to focus on that here,” she explains. “The design really benefited, thinking more about visual links between all of the spaces internally and the void, and making sure light moved around the space.”
Practicalities
While an open space made the most sense from a functional point of view for the age of the children, it in turn created a host of challenges. Acoustics in particular was a
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crucial consideration: “The combination of open plan nature and children yelling is not great!” Garriga says. “The acoustician was involved from day one.”
The solutions offered by the acoustician were integrated with the design as much as possible so as to avoid them looking, as Garriga says, “stuck on” – such as acoustic boards that became murals or pinboards. Specifying acoustic solutions mean the classrooms can function independently as well as allowing for more open plan learning. “We have all these hugely absorbent surfaces on the walls and hanging acoustic baffles on the ceilings so we could expose all the services to create a bigger volume while also helping with the acoustics – it was all designed together because we knew who was going to be using the space, and how,” Garriga explains. The building’s location at the rear of the school, close to the school’s boundary and therefore its neighbours, posed its own challenges. The rear playground on which the extension was built is small, meaning there were a lot of “physical constraints,” says Garriga. The original school building is three to four storeys high and therefore completely overshadows the site, but in order to avoid any overlooking of the neighbours the new building couldn’t be too high. “We had to keep good distances from the boundaries, the neighbours, and
ADF JANUARY 2024
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