FIRST LOOK

Henley Halebrown completes Hackney school and housing scheme

East London-based practice Henley Halebrown has completed Hackney New Primary School, a 8,180m2 mixed-use project with affordable housing in Hackney’s Kingsland Road Conservation Area

Located opposite Hackney New School, an earlier project also completed by Henley Halebrown in 2013, the Shoreditch-based practice’s latest project is a mixed-use primary school and housing project in Hackney’s Kingsland Road Conservation Area.

The Hackney New Primary School, founded in 2015, accommodates 350 pupils, while the adjacent 11-storey apartment block has 68 flats with retail at ground floor level.

The scheme fuses two building typologies – the courtyard or cloistered school and a residential point block – to free up space for the school.

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The school, which is arranged around a hidden inner courtyard lined with glazed brickwork in an ivory finish, and sheltered by zinc and glazed canopies reminiscent of Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Cemetery in Sweden, achieves good daylight while providing an acoustic buffer to the traffic of east London’s Kingsland Road.

 

The arrangement of the school’s spaces to the perimeter of the site allow for the largest play space possible. External circulation is in the form of covered galleries and a rooftop play space, creating a direct relationship between inside and out.

The classrooms, music rooms, main hall and administrative spaces also look inwards towards the courtyard, with classrooms paired together so that one year group can be taught alongside another within the two overlapping spaces.

The assembly hall fronts a quieter street next to the school entrance.

Designed in collaboration with the artist Paul Morrison, the entrance gates to the school depict a spider’s web and dandelion, marking the threshold between the adult world and that for children. A concrete bench runs the length of the school’s southern façade, creating a space where parents can wait for their children at the end of day.

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The residential tower, for housing charity Dolphin Living, sits on the south-east corner of the site. The masonry structure consists of paired floors with loggias carved out of the mass of the brickwork. A double-storey band goes round the base of the building.

At the top of the tower, an open colonnade is capped by a precast entablature. Through this, the sky and penthouse terraces can be seen.

The scheme consists of mainly red brick with columns, beams, string courses and parapets of a deep red precast concrete, the colour created from red sandstone aggregate.

Henley Halebrown won planning for the east London primary school and 11-storey block of flats in January 2017.

Architect’s view

Schools are organisations but they're also social infrastructures. The way they are planned, designed, and programmed shapes the interactions that develop in and around them,’ says Professor of Sociology at New York University, Eric Klinenberg. ‘For students, teachers, parents and entire communities, schools can either foster or inhibit trust, solidarity, and a shared commitment to the common good. They can also set boundaries that define who is part of the community and who is excluded. They can integrate or segregate, create opportunities or keep people in their place.’ These words, taken from Klinenberg’s book Palaces for the People, How to Build a More Equal & United Society (2018), remind us that buildings do so much more than just function. And for a school, there is more at stake than a child’s education.

So, when we talk about a school, and how it works we need to look beyond teaching and learning to the way space shapes interaction, and so conjures up moments that facilitate association and friendship. As Klinenberg explains, ‘Schools are our modern agoras, gathering places where we make and remake ourselves and develop a sense of where we belong.’

At Hackney New Primary School these ideas play out in the configuration of the school around a courtyard – quite literally Klinenberg’s agora – and the walls and thresholds that line that courtyard and the pavements outside the school.

The parti substitutes internal corridors for open galleries that wrap around the courtyard. Staircases are also external and covered so movement is visible and sociable. The glazed brickwork walls that line the courtyard are sheltered by canopies. Beneath, the thick walls are composed of a variety of differently dimensioned windows and doorways. Walking past a classroom, a low sill offers a passing pupil a window into that world. Another window deep-set, with a high sill, incorporates a bench adjacent to each classroom door. In effect, each classroom is given a 'shopfront' to the courtyard. Something the youngest reception pupils take quite literally. The classroom door incorporates a shutter, at the end of the day, allowing the teacher to welcome parents to the classroom without losing a child who might otherwise escape through the door.

Out on the street, the school hall fronts the quieter street next to the school entrance. Windows separate tiers of storey-high brick panels bearing on concrete string courses. The hall is lit by a necklace of clerestory windows at first floor. As a result the ground floor presents a blind storey to the street and at its base, a bench. Here, parents can sit on a south-facing bench and chat having dropped off their child or whilst waiting for them at the end of the school day. And when it rains, parents can shelter under the arcade on the other side of the school gates.

Hackney New Primary School embeds social value in particular in the outside spaces. These spaces, which are in effect free, are shaped by the building and configuration of the plan. The thresholds invite children, teachers and parents to linger, giving them the time to establish friendships and relationships, which in time will enable parents in particular to make the friends that both they and their children need. State schools, like libraries, are free and yet they have so much more potential than the title ‘school’ suggests. They can solve practical problems, juggling work and childcare, that the welfare state might otherwise struggle to address, enrich and dignify family life, and provide a social network which might otherwise allude many of those families.

This project is inherently urban as it brings different, unrelated uses together to make a new part of the city. By introducing two familiar building forms – the courtyard and the tower – the hybrid project is readily legible. The residential point block with its arcade at street level has a landmark quality that lends a civic presence to both the School and the new homes. The low level public seating within the school’s external wall is also about creating this type of shared, communal space.

Simon Henley, founding partner, Henley Halebrown

 

 

Project data

Start on site April 2017
Completion date April 2020
Gross internal floor area 8500m²
Gross (internal + external) floor area GIA 1,730m², GEA 2,105m²
Form of contract or procurement route Design Development and Build (bespoke)
Construction cost £23.5 million (construction cost)
Construction cost per m2 £3,030 (estimated)
Architect Henley Halebrown
Artist Paul Morrison
Client Downham Road Ltd (JV), Education Funding & Skills Agency (EFSA), The Benyon Estate, Thornsett, Hackney New School Academy Trust
Structural engineer Techniker
M&E consultant Elementa (pre-contract), Silcock Dawson (construction)
QS RLB (pre-contract), Thornsett Structures (during construction)
Landscape consultant Tyler Grange (pre-contract)
Planting Jennifer Benyon Design
Acoustic consultant Pace Consult
Project manager RLB
CDM co-ordinator Potter Raper
Approved building inspector MLM
Main contractor Thornsett Structures
CAD software used Vectorworks

Environmental performance data

On-site energy generation 88.83% (67% CHP, 21.83% PVs)
Airtightness at 50pa 3m3/h.m2
Heating and hot water load 39.3 kWh/m2/yr
Overall area-weighted U-value 0.4 W/m2K
Design life Structure 50 years; external walls 40 years; roof coverings 30 years; external windows and doors 25 years
Annual CO2 emissions 25.49 tonnes per year (school and retail)

 

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