Following an extensive consultation process with the school staff and students, Alsop Sparch has created an innovative school design that takes the form of a distinctive circular building.
The new school will provide nursery, primary school, adult education and community facilities covering an area of 3021 square metres over two floors. It features open-plan learning spaces, flexible and adaptable classrooms that are capable of supporting a range of teaching and learning styles, and covered external spaces for outdoor learning.
In the circular main building, teaching space is arranged as a ring of cellular accommodation around the ‘Living Room’ – a large open-plan flexible learning environment. A continuous external balcony provides external teaching spaces to the upper classrooms and provides cover to the outdoor learning spaces at ground level.
To achieve maximum adaptability, the design works with the building’s structural and façade grid to create classrooms that can be subdivided and partitions that can be taken down and relocated. Adjacent to the ‘Living Room’, an enclosed area named ‘The Studio’ designed for performance and presentation has been created to allow noisy activities to take place without disrupting activity in the Living Room. Administration and adult learning are clustered around the main entrance.
The main building is linked by a canopy to a smaller stand-alone pavilion, ‘The Ballroom’, which contains the school’s dining and main hall facilities is available for community use.
The main building will create a strong visual impact by virtue of its coloured facade and balcony cladding of black and white vertical fins. In contrast to the colourful main building, the Ballroom pavilion is clad in silver metal panels. Inspired by period ballrooms, a finer decorative metal relief breaks up the mass to create an attractive and distinctive façade.
The school grounds will be extensively landscaped, providing hard and soft play areas together with growing gardens, natural habitat and a ‘Dry River Bed’. A new multi-use Games Area will be shared with the local community and bore holes beneath the pitch will form the Ground Source Heat Pump that contributes to the building achieving a predicted 20% carbon reduction and BREEAM ‘very good’ rating.
Alsop Sparch was appointed to design the new Michael Faraday Community School following an open design competition in 2007. The project continues Alsop Sparch’s long-standing relationship with Southwark. The practice has previously contributed to the borough’s evolving, dynamic landscape through the completion of the Stirling prize-winning Peckham library in 1999 and the Palestra building opposite the new Southwark tube station.
