Events Wood Awards
Celebrating communal school life Highly commended for the Education & Public Sector Award, Ibstock Place School Refectory is a reimagined grand timber hall that offers a soothing visual and aural space for pupils.
M
accreanor Lavington Architects has created a new school refectory with three dramatic vaulted roofs, each a diamond-grid lattice of glued laminated (glulam) timber beams rising to a glazed lantern. It stands in the grounds of Ibstock Place School in Roehampton, south-west London, and the three vaulted volumes define the primary functions of the building – dining hall, servery and kitchen. Every day 1,200 pupils come here for lunch – the dining hall can seat up to 500 pupils at any one time – and the lofty spaces aim to help celebrate communal school life. As the architect explains: ‘To create an interior that was celebratory while warm, welcoming and comfortable to use, we naturally looked at timber, both as a structural element and as a finish. In our practice, we use timber for its low-carbon qualities, visual warmth and character; and because of the quality and programming benefits that prefabrication of timber components can offer.’
The transformation Ibstock Place is a private co-educational school for pupils from nursery to sixth form, and occupies the house and grounds of a former 16-bedroom Edwardian mansion with additional school buildings – theatre, classrooms and new refectory – all set between mature trees in the original landscaped gardens. Running alongside the eastern garden boundary, the refectory has a backdrop of mature London plane trees, and its external materials, clay-tiled roofs and London stock brickwork walls make reference to the neighbouring buildings on the site. The gentle roof pitches descend to relatively low eaves to reduce the visual impact of the large internal volumes. A colonnade with brick piers runs along the main facade of the refectory and links it to paths leading to other parts of the school. >> FSC-A000503 / PEFC/16-44-002
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Timber 2022
