Reading room
New breakfast club and reading centre for Pakeman Primary School, Islington, London
“Realising Dreams” – Goldman Sachs Partners, funders
Pakeman Primary School places a large emphasis on involvement of the community and parents with a massive focus on the challenge of improving literacy with up to a dozen volunteers at the school in any week.
An attractive, well-resourced space enables the school to: Increase numbers attending both breakfast club and playcentre: Broaden the range of activities on offer, such as a homework club: Provide a quiet learning place for targeted children to be taught individually or in small groups: Offer nurture groups for vulnerable children: Upgrade the provision of Art and Music teaching.
This is a warm, quiet, open extraordinary place. Two discrete rooms fit together inside the Lodge. The shape absorbs the old Victorian arcade shelter as a breakfast club, with the new reading room turned to look out, up, west and east across the playground. The new Lodge can be opened up to the outside to include the playgrounds and sky when desired, or closed tight and quiet for more introspective use.
The two distinct and interconnected spaces are wrapped up in a treated timber board wall. In plan, it’s a wriggly line joining the garden back brick wall in the west to the brick out houses in the east. In elevation the lapped vertical boards make a wooden curtain with window and door openings easily cut to conceal the frames on the outside, whilst allowing the openings on the inside to be framed as simple rectangles. Behind the new wooden wall and old brick parapets the roofscape is set back from the neighbours where high, with new and old roofs clad alike in a dark rubber membrane and natural slate.
Service: Architects
Location: Holloway, London
Client: Pakeman Primary School
Cost: £x
Areas: xxm²
Dates: 2013
Contract: TBC
Energy: BREEAM Excellent equivalent