design solutions
A garden school in the heart of the city
Architecture Initiative’s new primary school in east London has opened its doors to over 700 pupils. Designed for Tower Hamlets School and London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Olga Primary School envisions a “garden oasis” in the heart of the capital city
pupils increasing as the building rises. The three-storey, glazed atrium creates a circulation core that separates the structure into two distinct volumes: one accommodates the teaching centre; the other contains the administrative and communal spaces, delivering the added benefit of opening the facility to the wider community outside of schooling hours. Replacing a single-storey 1982 structure,
T
Architecture Initiative’s design compacts the building’s footprint by building upwards to better serve the needs of the community. Positioned at the edge of the site boundary, the school provides a “buffer” to separate the luscious landscaping from the neighbouring residential blocks. Green space is incredibly important to
Olga Primary School and the architect responds to this by incorporating a variety of terraced gardens and trees to create a rare “green oasis” to inspire children within an exciting and unconventional environment. While the school’s capacity has increased
threefold, the quaint “village feel” has been safeguarded by expanding the architecture vertically to avoid sprawling across the site plan and consequently affecting the landscape. Building upwards also means that all year groups have immediate access to outside space – the ground floor to the gardens; the first floor to terraces; and the second floor to the roof – linking the pupils with the ecology of the surrounding area. Architecture
Initiative’s careful
HE school’s vertical design consolidates 25 classrooms around a naturally-lit atrium with the age of
consideration of materiality corresponds with the surrounding environment to create a sensitive, contextual design. The teaching centre, built from London Stock brick, features neatly-proportioned windows in response to the local vernacular. In contrast, the admin and communal building is clad in Corten weathering steel inspired by the warm colours of the woodland trees in autumn. Lee Mainwaring, Design Director at
Architecture Initiative, said: “Our aim is to ensure that a new generation of schools inspires and nurtures learning. Olga Primary School has been designed to interact with nature in different ways at each level, creating a variety of experiences and teaching environments beyond the standard classroom. This vertical approach allows the school itself to encourage awareness of biodiversity, ecology and nature, which is often rare in an inner-city school.” The practice collaborated on the
interior fit-out, opting for a small palette of bright aquas and limes to complement the raw materiality of the pale concrete finishes and birch ply interior cladding – expressed in a contemporary, Scandinavian style. Large graphics ensure that the teals and greens of the site’s gardens are brought into the interior. The bold and bright graphics change for each year group up the course of the building. The design was inspired by the
surrounding trees and provides a garden environment for the children. It was constructed on site with an insitu concrete frame and is clad in
brick and Corten with alternating glazing elements. The weathered-steel cladding is undulated in panels of differing sizes to form a highly-textured surface finish inspired by the tree barks of the neighbouring conservation area. Certain panels are perforated to create
a breathable façade which ventilates the building naturally, rather than relying heavily on mechanical engineering services, saving energy, capital and running costs. From a technical perspective this was challenging. The actuated louvres, which respond automatically to the interior temperature and carbon dioxide levels, are designed to be used on the exterior of a building, and so concealing them behind a perforated sheet of metal reduced the free openable area compromising the ventilation strategy. To overcome this the architects created a plenum within the actual facade itself. This approach allowed a much greater surface area of perforations to feed into each louvre maximising the air flow through them and thus making the natural ventilation strategy work with the design concept for the façade and building. A similar
solution was adopted in
18
educationdab.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49
