Client St Paul's Girls' School
Location London, UK
Status Planning approved
Jestico + Whiles has designed a new scheme for one of the country’s leading independent schools, St Paul’s Girls’ School. The new masterplan aims to offer students and teachers an exemplary 21st century learning environment, whilst retaining the character and prestige of the listed Edwardian buildings elsewhere on campus.
The masterplan, which emerged from an extensive stakeholder consultation exercise, transforms the existing Main Building, designed by Gerald Horsley between 1903 -1911. On the western side of the campus is the two-storey Centre for Design & Innovation; a cross-curricula multi-faceted space incorporating technology, design, and maker spaces conceived around collaborative working and shared educational experience.
On the eastern side, the second new building is a three-storey Staff Hub which consolidates disparate staff accommodation into a new collegiate and agile working environment. Unusually for a staff facility, it is designed to be student-centred, improving communication, pastoral care and wellbeing.
The two new buildings take their design cues from the Arts and Crafts detailing of Horsley’s original. Contemporary gable forms, chimneys and red brick and stone detailing allow them to sympathetically integrate into the school campus.
Sustainability has informed design thinking from the outset. The chimneys are part of a ventilation strategy which maximises natural ventilation, and includes a thermal labyrinth for temperature stability.
Glulam and CLT form the majority of the superstructures, which alongside re-use of existing masonry, significantly reduces embodied carbon of the new buildings, whilst the introduction of a site wide ambient heating and cooling loop linked to heat pumps will substantially reduce operational carbon.
