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Chobham Academy
Chobham Academy
City of London, United Kingdom
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Other Projects by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Chobham Academy
City of London, United Kingdom
YEAR
2013
Chobham Academy is a new all-ages school in the London 2012 Olympic Park. Opening in September 2013 with a specialism in literature and the performing arts, it will serve the established local communities of Leyton and Stratford and the emerging community of the post-Games Park, both in and out of school hours.
Designed as part of a strong new urban grain whose pattern is reflective of existing London streets, a powerful drum form centres three connected buildings. These define space on a campus that is open, attractive, economical and sustainable. The buildings contain distinctive but unfussy spaces carefully related to the pupils, staff and activities within. Façades are varied yet controlled, and restrainedly coloured.
The Academy is a dynamic civic focus for the area.
Site history
The Olympic Park covers 2.5 square kilometres of the Lower Lea Valley. Remains of Stone Age human activity have been found at Stratford, with settlement dated to the Bronze Age. Major Roman road systems passed through the area. The river Lea was joined to the nearby Thames in the eighteenth century, and emergence as a chemical engineering base and the coming of the railway in the mid-nineteenth century confirmed the locale’s importance in the development of east London.
The project site was latterly occupied by an international rail and road freight terminal and housing. Contamination was present, although remediation associated with the Lee Valley Park had occurred in places.
Pre-Olympic bid
The vast Thames Gateway regeneration plan, begun in the 1980s, had brought the Jubilee Line Extension depot to Stratford in 1996. In 2004, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris was engaged by developers Chelsfield and Stanhope and London & Continental Railways to test sites within a mixed-use masterplan by architects Fletcher Priest for a new scheme called Stratford City, west of the town centre.
The work encompassed residential blocks further north and, at broadly the same location as the current project, an academy. A drum shape for this important public building was present in the masterplan at this early stage.
Post-Olympic bid
With selection in 2005 of London as host for the summer Games of the XXX Olympiad, Stratford City was suggested for the principal sporting venues and the Olympic Village. The latter could be used as housing after the Games, a sustainable legacy that also supported the Thames Gateway plan. Lend Lease acquired the other developers’ interests and refocused the existing masterplan.
Returning to work with Fletcher Priest, who retained responsibility for infrastructure, overall planning and a Westfield shopping centre, AHMM examined the residential areas anew with the aim of making them feel like a piece of London. Close study of successful quarters like Maida Vale, Pimlico and Mayfair showed how large repetitive blocks bring formal identity, though with pleasant deviations and moments of surprise such as a crank in a road or a crescent that gives onto a street. Vistas are terminated appropriately, with churches and other prominent civic buildings. A hierarchy of city spaces that are alike but varied results, that delights as well as impresses.
AHMM’s masterplanning work, carried out in 2006/07, produced a set of ideas and proposals which led to the fundamental re-thinking of the residential masterplan. These proposals underpin the successful urban aspects of the Village and highlighted the key position and function of the academy within it, as the only public building. (An analogy was drawn to the Royal Albert Hall and its adjacent mansion house blocks.)
After helping to select the architects for the residential buildings AHMM withdrew to concentrate on the academy, leaving Lend Lease to undertake the further development and densification of standard units, frames and cladding systems with other architects.
Olympic site
In 2008 an Academy – which is funded centrally but with a contribution from a private sponsor, and independent of local authority control – was confirmed on the previously-examined site, its catchment including the existing population. It would though now be an ‘all-through’ school for ages 3 to 18, and be named Chobham Academy after an existing approach road and a farm historically located on the site.
A key figure was socially-minded developer Nigel Hugill, formerly managing director of Chelsfield and at this time executive chairman of Lend Lease Europe. Hugill encouraged development of an academy and Lend Lease as the school’s sponsor. Although Hugill later resigned from the firm, he remains personally involved as chair of Chobham’s trustees.
AHMM was now invited to validate the academy’s provisional form in context, design it in detail and retest its suitability for other uses during the Games.
Chobham Academy
Evolution of the masterplan had cleared an axis to concentrate more visibly on the school. Returning to the site, AHMM reviewed the drum shape in light of the earlier existing London street grain analysis and also thoroughly investigated alternative theoretical and constructed spatial layouts for the requirements of a typical academy. The lack of involvement from an existing school brought freedoms, but also unanswerable questions as to future intentions.
AHMM determined that the drum form would allow the school to become an effective marker building at its terminus. It also replied equally to the old and new sides of the site. Various radii were explored to successfully verify that a circular plan would be neither more expensive to construct nor less practical than a more conventional shape, and determine the optimal size of rooms.
Considerations of programme, flexibility, security and expandability saw other buildings placed to make an urban, site-specific campus that delineated the borders of that site but also engaged with the surrounding streets. A new public realm emerged between the two, providing shelter, entrances and good community access. Within the buildings were placed clusters of classrooms with some larger-span spaces for the specialism areas.
Education Organisational Models
Elements
Chobham Academy comprises three buildings that are linked to each other and work independently but also together, reflecting usage of and progress through the school by its pupils and availability for the wider community.
The infant school occupies a two-storey rectilinear block to one side of the drum, with its own entrance. A day care centre, currently run separately from the academy, has a directly south-facing play area whose five wall portholes will be ringed with bright Olympic colours. Here, the architectural language has been adapted to be as sensitive as possible to very small children for whom a single storey is a double height space. Nursery and reception spaces on the ground floor open onto their own play areas. On the upper floor teaching spaces share a top-lit corridor, with an external stair making a direct connection to the playground.
A ground level connection is made to the five-storey drum-shaped structure of the middle and upper school. A full-height atrium is overlooked by open galleries on each floor. It is pinched by two stacks of wedge-shaped ‘lobes’ projecting into it, subtly demarcating a more private area beyond for dining and cafe areas. Access to the playground is via a covered, external buffer space, a comfortable place on a rainy day. The main public entrance is a glazed box with discreet security and monitoring control, and secondary entrances link to the other buildings. The lobes hold more fully-serviced teaching areas, acoustically and thermally separated, and feature glass and spandrel panels gently inclined at opposing angles. Three roof terraces with dramatic views to the City and beyond are fully usable as open-air teaching spaces. Roughly a third of the building may be isolated to allow separation at age 11 or 12 if desired.
The Specialism Building is equipped with a theatre complete with rehearsal space and retractable bleacher seating, dance and drama studios, music rooms, art and design technology rooms top-lit via generous north lights and a sports hall. Entered from the playing fields during the school day, there is also an entrance from the public square; a continuous canopy here wraps around a corner of the building, a welcoming gesture recalling classic inter-war theatre and cinema architecture. The sports hall can be locked off from the rest of the school for community use through a third entrance.
A new bridge, 95 metres in length and acting as a gateway from the north east, springs from the specialism building across the busy Temple Mill Lane and lands on a formed mound sitting within additional playing fields. Executed in COR-TEN® weathering steel, it is defiantly slender and an expression of the structural stress diagram used to create it, with external fins describing a ribbon of varying size along its length. Two double-V support ‘trees’, also of weathering steel, rest on pre-cast concrete piers. Providing safe transit day and night, concealed internal feature lighting diffuses through a series of portholes which respond to the rhythm of the fins.
Architectural composition
Externally, the buildings are articulated by three principal materials: smooth black concrete, a unifying plinth for each element; curtain walling in a delicate pale green, enclosing the upper floors; and light grey concrete panels, robustly ribbed, to clad the specialism building.
The plinth wall is of concrete self-coloured by the use of black aggregate in a dark grey matrix. Pre-cast in sections, it is highly polished to provide a calm face to the street, in contrast to the more highly modelled storeys above.
The curtain walling employs deep cover caps to generate a crisp, well-defined grid, accented by sloping and projecting air intake cowls. The masterplan called for single-colour buildings in the Olympic Village, and these from a very restricted colour palette. After a flirtation with shades of orange (vetoed by others), AHMM considered the colouration of glass as a natural material. Inherent iron content gives standard float glass a slightly green appearance. This natural tint will change the colour of any paint applied, such as on the reverse of glass spandrel panels which were always intended to be opaque. AHMM therefore decided to coat all insulated spandrel panels with a simple white colour, which reads as eau de nil when seen through the glass. Importantly this colour is on the back face of the inner pane of a double glazed unit – seen through the sheets of float glass not only is the white turned to eau de nil but a series of small and large scale reflections occur.
The design thinking that transformed this from a standard treatment into something more powerful and unusual was that this eau de nil colour was also selected for the grid of aluminium mullions and transoms. The colour was mixed to order by the paint manufacturer, and matches perfectly the colour of the glass spandrel panels. As a counterpoint and witty comment on the cost and material characteristics of glass, more expensive low-iron glass is inset as small panes into the facade; backed with the same paint, they remain pure white, a non-colour highlight creating an effect similar to that of ticking on a tailored suit.
On parts of the specialism building, light grey concrete is acid-etched to bring out the silvery flecks of mica present in the mix and moulded into a deep, sinusoidal profile section. The ribbing is drawn back from the top edges of the panels to give a neat finish to a surface that provides a visually effective but economical covering for much of the large box that is this building.
External and internal details
Self-finished materials predominate, including blue engineering bricks to the atrium’s lower walls and exposed fair-faced concrete on ceilings and columns. The atrium is roofed with ETFE pillows; solar control patterning alternates between top and bottom surfaces, creating interest and revealing their form. They are supported by beams of glulam timber, a warm, natural material.
Where applied colour is used, this is done sparingly. Vestibule walls in the lower school and balustrading in the main building are of different primary colours, helping children mark their movement through the school daily and annually. Black joinery for doors and frames maintains their appearance for longer.
The use of such materials without additional applied finishes reduces cost, speeds construction and makes buildings durable in use, without the need to maintain ceilings and paintwork.
Landscaping
The campus is integrated into its surroundings through its landscaping strategy as well as its materials, generating a significant new public realm. This manifests itself in often-subtle details.
The school is somewhat higher than the surrounding streets through gentle manipulation of levels, discussed at an early stage with Nigel Hugill and an unusual benefit made possible by distribution of spoil from site-wide tunnelling works. It is circled by a low wall, of the same polished concrete as the plinths of its buildings. A single line of Tennyson’s Ulysses has been selected for installation along the length facing the square following a public competition.
Across the play areas, hard and soft materials are used to make ponds, catwalks, games areas and seating. An acoustically-absorbent willow-bundle hedge, gently illuminated at night, shields the campus from a railway line at its furthest boundary and brings a perception of depth across the site.
Designed as part of a strong new urban grain whose pattern is reflective of existing London streets, a powerful drum form centres three connected buildings. These define space on a campus that is open, attractive, economical and sustainable. The buildings contain distinctive but unfussy spaces carefully related to the pupils, staff and activities within. Façades are varied yet controlled, and restrainedly coloured.
The Academy is a dynamic civic focus for the area.
Site history
The Olympic Park covers 2.5 square kilometres of the Lower Lea Valley. Remains of Stone Age human activity have been found at Stratford, with settlement dated to the Bronze Age. Major Roman road systems passed through the area. The river Lea was joined to the nearby Thames in the eighteenth century, and emergence as a chemical engineering base and the coming of the railway in the mid-nineteenth century confirmed the locale’s importance in the development of east London.
The project site was latterly occupied by an international rail and road freight terminal and housing. Contamination was present, although remediation associated with the Lee Valley Park had occurred in places.
Pre-Olympic bid
The vast Thames Gateway regeneration plan, begun in the 1980s, had brought the Jubilee Line Extension depot to Stratford in 1996. In 2004, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris was engaged by developers Chelsfield and Stanhope and London & Continental Railways to test sites within a mixed-use masterplan by architects Fletcher Priest for a new scheme called Stratford City, west of the town centre.
The work encompassed residential blocks further north and, at broadly the same location as the current project, an academy. A drum shape for this important public building was present in the masterplan at this early stage.
Post-Olympic bid
With selection in 2005 of London as host for the summer Games of the XXX Olympiad, Stratford City was suggested for the principal sporting venues and the Olympic Village. The latter could be used as housing after the Games, a sustainable legacy that also supported the Thames Gateway plan. Lend Lease acquired the other developers’ interests and refocused the existing masterplan.
Returning to work with Fletcher Priest, who retained responsibility for infrastructure, overall planning and a Westfield shopping centre, AHMM examined the residential areas anew with the aim of making them feel like a piece of London. Close study of successful quarters like Maida Vale, Pimlico and Mayfair showed how large repetitive blocks bring formal identity, though with pleasant deviations and moments of surprise such as a crank in a road or a crescent that gives onto a street. Vistas are terminated appropriately, with churches and other prominent civic buildings. A hierarchy of city spaces that are alike but varied results, that delights as well as impresses.
AHMM’s masterplanning work, carried out in 2006/07, produced a set of ideas and proposals which led to the fundamental re-thinking of the residential masterplan. These proposals underpin the successful urban aspects of the Village and highlighted the key position and function of the academy within it, as the only public building. (An analogy was drawn to the Royal Albert Hall and its adjacent mansion house blocks.)
After helping to select the architects for the residential buildings AHMM withdrew to concentrate on the academy, leaving Lend Lease to undertake the further development and densification of standard units, frames and cladding systems with other architects.
Olympic site
In 2008 an Academy – which is funded centrally but with a contribution from a private sponsor, and independent of local authority control – was confirmed on the previously-examined site, its catchment including the existing population. It would though now be an ‘all-through’ school for ages 3 to 18, and be named Chobham Academy after an existing approach road and a farm historically located on the site.
A key figure was socially-minded developer Nigel Hugill, formerly managing director of Chelsfield and at this time executive chairman of Lend Lease Europe. Hugill encouraged development of an academy and Lend Lease as the school’s sponsor. Although Hugill later resigned from the firm, he remains personally involved as chair of Chobham’s trustees.
AHMM was now invited to validate the academy’s provisional form in context, design it in detail and retest its suitability for other uses during the Games.
Chobham Academy
Evolution of the masterplan had cleared an axis to concentrate more visibly on the school. Returning to the site, AHMM reviewed the drum shape in light of the earlier existing London street grain analysis and also thoroughly investigated alternative theoretical and constructed spatial layouts for the requirements of a typical academy. The lack of involvement from an existing school brought freedoms, but also unanswerable questions as to future intentions.
AHMM determined that the drum form would allow the school to become an effective marker building at its terminus. It also replied equally to the old and new sides of the site. Various radii were explored to successfully verify that a circular plan would be neither more expensive to construct nor less practical than a more conventional shape, and determine the optimal size of rooms.
Considerations of programme, flexibility, security and expandability saw other buildings placed to make an urban, site-specific campus that delineated the borders of that site but also engaged with the surrounding streets. A new public realm emerged between the two, providing shelter, entrances and good community access. Within the buildings were placed clusters of classrooms with some larger-span spaces for the specialism areas.
Education Organisational Models
Elements
Chobham Academy comprises three buildings that are linked to each other and work independently but also together, reflecting usage of and progress through the school by its pupils and availability for the wider community.
The infant school occupies a two-storey rectilinear block to one side of the drum, with its own entrance. A day care centre, currently run separately from the academy, has a directly south-facing play area whose five wall portholes will be ringed with bright Olympic colours. Here, the architectural language has been adapted to be as sensitive as possible to very small children for whom a single storey is a double height space. Nursery and reception spaces on the ground floor open onto their own play areas. On the upper floor teaching spaces share a top-lit corridor, with an external stair making a direct connection to the playground.
A ground level connection is made to the five-storey drum-shaped structure of the middle and upper school. A full-height atrium is overlooked by open galleries on each floor. It is pinched by two stacks of wedge-shaped ‘lobes’ projecting into it, subtly demarcating a more private area beyond for dining and cafe areas. Access to the playground is via a covered, external buffer space, a comfortable place on a rainy day. The main public entrance is a glazed box with discreet security and monitoring control, and secondary entrances link to the other buildings. The lobes hold more fully-serviced teaching areas, acoustically and thermally separated, and feature glass and spandrel panels gently inclined at opposing angles. Three roof terraces with dramatic views to the City and beyond are fully usable as open-air teaching spaces. Roughly a third of the building may be isolated to allow separation at age 11 or 12 if desired.
The Specialism Building is equipped with a theatre complete with rehearsal space and retractable bleacher seating, dance and drama studios, music rooms, art and design technology rooms top-lit via generous north lights and a sports hall. Entered from the playing fields during the school day, there is also an entrance from the public square; a continuous canopy here wraps around a corner of the building, a welcoming gesture recalling classic inter-war theatre and cinema architecture. The sports hall can be locked off from the rest of the school for community use through a third entrance.
A new bridge, 95 metres in length and acting as a gateway from the north east, springs from the specialism building across the busy Temple Mill Lane and lands on a formed mound sitting within additional playing fields. Executed in COR-TEN® weathering steel, it is defiantly slender and an expression of the structural stress diagram used to create it, with external fins describing a ribbon of varying size along its length. Two double-V support ‘trees’, also of weathering steel, rest on pre-cast concrete piers. Providing safe transit day and night, concealed internal feature lighting diffuses through a series of portholes which respond to the rhythm of the fins.
Architectural composition
Externally, the buildings are articulated by three principal materials: smooth black concrete, a unifying plinth for each element; curtain walling in a delicate pale green, enclosing the upper floors; and light grey concrete panels, robustly ribbed, to clad the specialism building.
The plinth wall is of concrete self-coloured by the use of black aggregate in a dark grey matrix. Pre-cast in sections, it is highly polished to provide a calm face to the street, in contrast to the more highly modelled storeys above.
The curtain walling employs deep cover caps to generate a crisp, well-defined grid, accented by sloping and projecting air intake cowls. The masterplan called for single-colour buildings in the Olympic Village, and these from a very restricted colour palette. After a flirtation with shades of orange (vetoed by others), AHMM considered the colouration of glass as a natural material. Inherent iron content gives standard float glass a slightly green appearance. This natural tint will change the colour of any paint applied, such as on the reverse of glass spandrel panels which were always intended to be opaque. AHMM therefore decided to coat all insulated spandrel panels with a simple white colour, which reads as eau de nil when seen through the glass. Importantly this colour is on the back face of the inner pane of a double glazed unit – seen through the sheets of float glass not only is the white turned to eau de nil but a series of small and large scale reflections occur.
The design thinking that transformed this from a standard treatment into something more powerful and unusual was that this eau de nil colour was also selected for the grid of aluminium mullions and transoms. The colour was mixed to order by the paint manufacturer, and matches perfectly the colour of the glass spandrel panels. As a counterpoint and witty comment on the cost and material characteristics of glass, more expensive low-iron glass is inset as small panes into the facade; backed with the same paint, they remain pure white, a non-colour highlight creating an effect similar to that of ticking on a tailored suit.
On parts of the specialism building, light grey concrete is acid-etched to bring out the silvery flecks of mica present in the mix and moulded into a deep, sinusoidal profile section. The ribbing is drawn back from the top edges of the panels to give a neat finish to a surface that provides a visually effective but economical covering for much of the large box that is this building.
External and internal details
Self-finished materials predominate, including blue engineering bricks to the atrium’s lower walls and exposed fair-faced concrete on ceilings and columns. The atrium is roofed with ETFE pillows; solar control patterning alternates between top and bottom surfaces, creating interest and revealing their form. They are supported by beams of glulam timber, a warm, natural material.
Where applied colour is used, this is done sparingly. Vestibule walls in the lower school and balustrading in the main building are of different primary colours, helping children mark their movement through the school daily and annually. Black joinery for doors and frames maintains their appearance for longer.
The use of such materials without additional applied finishes reduces cost, speeds construction and makes buildings durable in use, without the need to maintain ceilings and paintwork.
Landscaping
The campus is integrated into its surroundings through its landscaping strategy as well as its materials, generating a significant new public realm. This manifests itself in often-subtle details.
The school is somewhat higher than the surrounding streets through gentle manipulation of levels, discussed at an early stage with Nigel Hugill and an unusual benefit made possible by distribution of spoil from site-wide tunnelling works. It is circled by a low wall, of the same polished concrete as the plinths of its buildings. A single line of Tennyson’s Ulysses has been selected for installation along the length facing the square following a public competition.
Across the play areas, hard and soft materials are used to make ponds, catwalks, games areas and seating. An acoustically-absorbent willow-bundle hedge, gently illuminated at night, shields the campus from a railway line at its furthest boundary and brings a perception of depth across the site.
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