Every child deserves…

… an excellent education and an excellent life wherever they live. What about a high-street school that’s always open?

A school’s success is related to its immediate and wider environment. A school’s physical position affects its position in people’s minds.

SCABAL believes that revitalized schools have a key part to play in the regeneration of their communities and it’s the architects’ responsibility to sustain these wider aspirations and direction of design process whilst bringing together and collating the essential demands of more school-specific design criteria.

As a development on our work with DfEE for their City Academies Design Guide, this project illustrates the desire for a new connectivity between the school and the city, between people and places, between living, learning, working and playing and even between childhood and adulthood.

Visualizing the layering and expansion of variously sized and shaped building and landscape facilities, showing people what the new shape of school could be like by redrawing conventional boundaries between school and city, the High-Street School is assembled and reassembled over the twenty-four-hour course of a day using the location of the turn-of-the-millennium Dalston High Street and the loosely gathered inspirational twentieth century school spaces of Duiker’s Open Air School in Amsterdam, the Leicester Engineering Building by James Stirling (amongst many others) with other building typologies and uses, workspaces, concert halls, hostels, games courts etc.

The overall vision is presented as a 3D animation sequence incorporating the coming and going of these individual rooms and whole buildings and landscapes that come and go over the course of the day, according to the rhythms of both school and community life, as shifting provisions for all.

The various parts appear and disappear as the school and non-school curriculums require, in order to address and overlap the demanding conditions and needs of the manifold constituencies found in the neighbourhood.

These drawings show a neighbourhood about to be transformed by a new station and the massive influx of new housing developments, describing how a school in and of the High Street, together with its combined constituency and infrastructure could develop various kinds of co-operation.

Situating the new schools as the beating heart of their communities expresses the commitment of society to the individual pupil, this project promotes an expectation that a good education embedded in its locality enables pupils as members of their communities to contribute in turn to society through the world of work, play and further education.

Developing and maintaining a recognizable school culture is an essential means of discouraging disaffection and fostering a sense of communal purpose. It can exploit the advantages associated with a sense of ownership as well as promoting a collective responsibility of care towards the building fabric.

Service: Creative Discipline

Location: UK

Client: Population

Cost: £tbc

Dates: 2012