LAURISTON SCHOOL

Ann Griffin

The primary school is a formative experience, socially and emotionally as well as educationally.As a childs first main setting outside the home, it acts as a transitional environment, an intermediary in preparing the child for the adult world. Therefore, the range of spaces offered and the movement between them supports the associated spectrum of developing experiences, from dynamic engagement and negotiation with the whole school community, to quiet spaces for focused learning and more personal contemplation and recovery.

Lauriston School is in Hackney, in north-east London, and started off as a Victorian board school, but it was rebuilt in the 1970s as a single-storey, modernist building. The Victorian buildings were used as educational-authority storage before being sold off for conversion into apartments in the 1990s. Both school buildings had been models of innovation in their time, for the board school had pioneered newly invented learning environment at the start of general education, and its 1970s replacement had proposed open-plan learning, with all classrooms as three-sided alcoves, opening off a connecting ring corridor. This promoted a shared sense of endeavour and allowed dynamic expression of each childs work, but it had become cramped, as demands outstripped provision. One reason was more personalised learning, which increasingly requires smaller, cellular spaces, not anticipated in the 1970s model, owing to an increase in individual, one-to-one teaching. There were also increases in small increased from eighteen to twenty-two pupils in the 1970s to a threshold of thirty, and further additional space was required for the pupils with disabilities, including specialist support spaces, such as hygiene and health rooms, along with sensory rooms for withdrawal and recovery¹.

To double its size and create more pupil places for the growing community, the school needed to be rebuilt. For the new Lauriston, completed in 2010, the staff and governors set a clear vision intended to capture the best of the previous schools qualities —their Lauriston-ness—while relieving them from the struggle against inadequate space, poor-quality fabric, woeful lack of acoustic control, dismal environmental conditions, with classrooms that overheated in summer and were too cold in winter, and an excessively internalised space, with limited connections to street and city. Despite these problems, the teaching at Lauriston was recognised nationally as outstanding. The staff had developed multiple approaches to learning, engaging pupils through creative project work, often with artist collaboration. They had exploited and benefitted from the open-plan layout to create non-hierarchical links between pupils of all ages, and between the teaching and non-teaching staff:

At Lauriston we see ourselves as a community of learners. Fundamental to our philosophy is the belief that we are all learning all of the time. Learning is not something that happens in a linear way but something that is accessed in different ways at different times. We want the school to be a centre for learning that meets the needs of its community—a school fit for the 21st century and a centre of excellence for the creative and performing arts².

The words of one young pupil encapsulated both the ethos and the physical condition that we first encountered: Lauriston is one big classroom3. The challenge was to create a new building that matched the quality and innovation of the teaching. We (myself and Philip Meadowcroft) won the commission as the only practice that had not designed a new school before, on the basis that we understood this core desire to define and retain the Lauriston-ness, and that we would achieve its translation into the new, larger school in close collaboration with the whole school community.

Together with the school, we developed a dual focus for participation: micro, which explored specific briefing and design issues to ensure that the project was a learning resource for the school, and macro, to develop the rich memory of the site and to promote understanding of the process of change. During the first year of work with the school, we carried out a series of transformation workshops to investigate the history of the site. This allowed children and staff to engage with the rebuilding in a positive manner. Specific workshops were dedicated to each of the historic layers: the rural condition as watercress fields was invoked through a cress-growing project in science week; the product was eaten in a summer-term picnic; and, in the autumn term, the playground was converted into a farm for a day. Later, the site had been developed as terraced housing, and so, in the winter term, a den was built in the playground to recall that setting, with role-play in Victorian costumes. As John Slyce, the school chair of governors, recalls:

During the various presentations, it became immediately clear to all of us on the panel that there was one practice that connected intimately with Lauristons ethos as it had evolved and developed—as often against as in agreement with the constrains and conditions of the building, or buildings, it grew out of. Ann Griffin and her team convinced us that they not only understood what we were putting forward as a somewhat complex brief-to preserve the schools good practice that had emerged from less than ideal, if not a bad, and increasingly failing context— in a new school building that would double its size and intake on a constrained and live site. We also wanted to increase the available play and outdoor teaching spaces⁴.

Our initial involvement as architects was intensive. With a tight p

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