Project: Frome Valley School, Crossways
A new primary school for the town of Crossways relocates a First school from the neighbouring village of Owermoigne and is designed for future expansion in three phases from an initial one form entry to a two form entry and ultimately to a full primary school. At each stage, the building retains coherence by virtue of the central courtyard – a play space and a garden – that provides a sanctuary for the children and a sense of identity for the school. There are six main elements expressed as simple cedar clad boxes with sweeping curved roofs to the classrooms, arranged around the central courtyard within a rendered wall enclosure. The school, surrounded by suburban housing, claims a civic presence by means of a tall bell tower.
Frome Valley First School is located in Crossways, a village eight miles to the west of Dorchester. The site for the new school was created by a Section 106 agreement attached to a neighbouring housing development.
The design seeks to optimise social spaces within the school, so the classrooms open into an informally shaped, shared-use resources area punctuated by three circular roof lights.
The new school is approached through an obstacle course of residential roads and announced with a civic gesture – a nine metre high clock tower with a new bell from the same Whitechapel foundry that made Big Ben.
The play court has coloured hard surfaces in a design by Jennifer Coe Landscape Architects that evoke crop circles, as well as the vapour trails and roundels of the Spitfires that flew from the nearby airfield more than sixty years ago.
The design was based on the idea of an enclosure, a kind of ‘walled garden’ that cultivates children rather than plants, to create a place of sanctuary. The plan places two classroom wings to the outer edges of the tapered site, sheltering behind walls that create small pocket gardens – play spaces – outside each classroom. Within the walls, the classrooms and hall are formed in structural insulated panels (SIP) construction, clad externally in cedar. Classrooms have cloud-like convex shaped ceilings that rise up toward clerestory glazing gaining balanced natural lighting as well as high-level stack effect natural ventilation with stale air convected above the heads of occupants.
PROJECT DETAILS Client: Status: Contract value:
The Diocese of Salisbury Completed 2007 £1,781,000.00
Structural Engineer: M+E Engineers: Cost Consultant:
Barton Engineers Anthony Gale associates Denley King