sketching

Another cold and windy London evening, another (very nice) architecture office and an abundant supplies of cookies….it’s a tough job!
Tonight was a smaller group then last time, so after going through our findings we could even have a go at some first sketches.

Matt came with some great books:
Koenigsberger. O.H. et al. (1973) - Manual of Tropical Housing and Building: Part 1 Climatic Design, Longman, London, UK
Roland Stulz and Kiran Mukerji (1993) - Appropriate Building Materials: A catalogue of potential solutions (Third Revised Edition). ITDG Publishing
Paul Oliver (ed.) - The Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, Cambridge University Press
and a load of information such as the right window percentage (20%), building on the east-west axis, no openings on the west side, a outside space on the north in wintertime and on the shaded south side in the summer, a rainfall of 800 mm. (London has an annual rainfall of 750 mm.) and the fact that the sun is much stronger at this latitude.

The main design issues at this stage were the need to locate the security guard next to the lockable computer room and to the car park.
As for the layout, we came up with the idea to incorporate an amphitheatre and a café.
We made some sketches, which all lead to the idea of dividing the large area into smaller sections: a road as a spine through the middle of the plot, on one side a café that would also be connected to the public area on the north side of the schoolsite. On the other side of the road would be the classrooms, and more to the south the library. This library would be in the quietest area and near to the existing secondary school.

As for the architecture; we are thinking about a small structure, to initiate the first three classrooms, with the prospect of replicating this configuration in the future as the school gets larger.