Client Stoke Newington School
Location London, UK
Status Built
Following Jestico + Whiles’ RIBA award-winning Building Schools for the Future (BSF) refurbishment and redevelopment of Stoke Newington School, the school approached the practice to design a new sixth-form centre to provide for an expanding cohort.
The resulting two-storey L-shaped building maximises the tight site’s available space to form a courtyard between it and the original school, responding to courtyards used throughout the 1967 Brutalist design. The modest new extension subtly blends in as a subordinate form, allowing the original masonry and bush-hammered concrete building to dominate, and the bold corten frontage of the BSF addition to remain as the beacon signalling the main entrance.
Following this language of the corten rainscreen clad entrance building, dark grey rainscreen cladding has been used externally. The system is a fibre cement cladding board; an appropriate material that enables the addition to ‘speak for itself’ whilst avoiding undermining the powerful language established by both the extension and the original Brutalist building. The design of the new centre has been subtly united with its context through flashes of corten (oriel windows) and of bold yellow (window reveals), both of which feature prominently on the neighbouring entrance building.
