Local dRMM (Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan) recently completed Clapham Manor Primary School in London, UK. This new teaching wing – an extension to an existing Victorian board school building – offers classrooms, performance space, staff facilities, reception and improved access while maximizing play space.

The project is reviewed by Ellis Woodman who describes the ‘boisterous polychromy’ of the glass facade.

Clapham Manor Primary School, a successful primary school with reception and nursery, approached dRMM with plans to meet the increasing demands of the local community. The survival of the school depended on the addition of new classrooms and the remodeling of existing ones to cope with student levels. The new wing is conceived as a freestanding addition that plugged into the Victorian Board School, allowing the school to work as a single entity.

The school is within a conservation area, a tight and delicate site: the solution is a 4-story extension reconciled within the height of the existing 3-story Victorian board school. The new extension is linked to existing via a glazed connection.

This polychromatic extension offers the school a new identity, much-needed learning spaces and an organizational hub, while maximizing play space.

The new intervention is pulled away from the flank wall to sit parallel with the neighboring Odd Fellows Hall. The resultant interstitial space establishes a formal entrance into the school – a triple height transparent atrium that separates new and old.

The architectural aspiration was to create a building that would sit shoulder to shoulder with two great brick exemplars. The façade is inspired by post war system-built schools, which utilized curtain walling to create bright and airy teaching spaces. The formal grid that typically defines curtain walling is replaced by a random grid to provide an expression appropriate for a primary school, inside and out.

The building appears without scale as the façade conceals clues to story heights – it is contextualized through color rather than composition. The façade is a polychromatic loop of color that shifts as it moves around the building. The contextual brick colors inform the rich reds and yellows along Stonhouse Street. The color spectrum shifts into greens as the building emerges on the playground side echoing the soft landscaping below, and finally into vibrant sky blues.

In addition to new classrooms, pupils benefit from spaces for performance, music, breakout learning and a medical room. Staff share a resource room, copy facilities, administration, and offices. The informal, social spaces that connect the classrooms are vibrant and stimulating, eliminating corridors and offering visual transparency.

The facade works doubly hard to define not only the exterior but also the interior. The vibrant coloured glass panels of the exterior are upholstered on the inside allowing opportunities for the display and presentation of pupils’ work. The dynamic quality of the triple aspect classrooms is further heightened by the composition of the views. Solid, fritted and clear panels at varying heights create amazing compositions of the urban landscape whilst being inclusive of all ages.