St Luke's CE Primary School

St Luke’s, a pioneering two-form entry primary school, was the first primary school in the UK to secure BREEAM ‘Excellent’. Through extensive user consultation and developing an understanding of the user's requirements, Architype developed a plan based around two shared hubs that support and enhance the school’s approach to creative shared teaching.

Location

Wolverhampton, UK

Area

2,600 m2

Status

Completed

Year

2009

Client

Wolverhampton City Council and All Saints & Blakenhall Community Development Partnership

A key architectural generator for the project was to provide a building that was highly energy efficient: to have minimal heating loads, minimal requirement for artificial lighting whilst maintaining a comfortable working environment that is an inspiration and an educational tool for all. Careful attention was given to the shape, form and section of the building, to maximise daylight, control solar gain and enable natural ventilation to all main spaces. The construction is a timber frame, insulated with 300–400mm thick recycled newspaper insulation in a ‘breathing construction’. Externally the building is clad with UK-grown Douglas Fir, and the roof is finished with cedar shingles. The building is heated with a biomass boiler linked to underfloor heating. A Building Management System (BMS) controls ventilation and passive night-time cooling. The heat energy use ranks in the best 25% of primary schools, and better than CIBSE best practice.

Our new school has an abundance of space, more than we could ever have imagined. The timber and the natural touches of the building have a calming influence on everyone. Children and staff are keen to work and love their new learning environment.

Alison Grennan, Head Teacher

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Vision

All vision

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Design

A conceptual generator of 'contrast' was adopted early in the project to guide design, following lengthy research into past and current teaching methodologies. A child's perception of the nature of 'things' from an early age, is fundamentally a view of 'extremes': things and experiences are seen as 'black or white'. A child has little notion of 'grey' or degrees of difference. It is in fact the 'degrees of difference' that a primary teacher is empowering the child to discover through experience, play and learning. A child's uniform notions of the world are 'ordered' and formal in their polar simplicity, whereas adult notions are informed from a wider experiential and historic context, resulting in an increasingly 'blurred' degree of categorisation with greater fluidity: chaotic.

A child's set of contrasts would include: good/bad; black/white; right/wrong; soft/hard; rough/smooth; light/dark; warm/cold; in/out and so on. The architectural challenge was to respond to the notion of contrasts to create a building that stimulates the natural curiosity of each child and gives teachers a dynamic teaching environment.

Maintaining visual links with the surrounding environment helps blur the perceived internal, external boundaries and locate oneself within the building. A language of transparency was sought to express the visual links from side to side and front to back and throughout the building with particular attention to the visual links with the green spaces immediately adjacent.

St Luke’s new Primary school is a truly uplifting and inspiring environment, where staff, parents and children enjoy coming to school.

Alison Grennan, Head Teacher

Expertise

Eco-minimalism

Architype’s approach is to integrate sustainability from first principles, rather than add it later. We describe this as ‘Eco-minimalism’.

Avoiding the performance gap

St Luke’s is a great example of a well-executed primary school that has had good performance outcomes and offers valuable learning for the delivery team.

Getting to know each other

Architype's approach is to discover, through consultation, the character and personality of an organisation and to then explore through a conceptual design approach ways of expressing this.