"The cantilevering roof plate is a dominant component of the architectural expression; during the day and especially in the evening, when the transparent façade allows the building to glow from the inside."
‘Good design must be “up front” to popularise the whole idea of building. It cannot be something that is taken for granted. Much more, it needs to be the visible shop window of an enlightened local authority, something that it can take pride in and perhaps in its more confident moments even boast about. It should infiltrate the visual standards of everything from signwriting and graphics to interior design, and a good deal inbetween. It should not be restricted to buildings, but should include spaces and environments generally, involving at the same time collaborations with artists and sculptors.’
This simple philosophy, which links good design to good local governance, was outlined by Hampshire County Council’s legendary head architect and 1991 RIBA Gold Medal winner Colin Stansfield Smith in Hampshire Architecture: 1974-1984, a book he edited in 1985. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed and Smith has long since retired from the architecture department to which he brought global acclaim with the schools he designed.
However, a new generation of county architects, under the tutelage of Bob Wallbridge and Alec Gillies, Hampshire’s joint heads of architecture, now adhere to the same philosophy, keeping it at the forefront of British school design. Two of Hampshire’s recent schemes, Lee-on-the-Solent Infant School and Pinewood Infant School featured in CABE’s primary school case study document published last month, and Pinewood picked up a RIBA Award last year.
Here, Wallbridge and Gillies provide a basic guide to the principles that underpin Hampshire’s approach to good school design: Place, Learning, Movement, Community, Environment and Tangibility.
The success of a project lies in how well it engages with its setting. There must be a sense of belonging, but there must also be delight. For Pinewood Infant School in Farnborough, we created a tranquil courtyard as an oasis among existing trees.
We design flexible learning environments with input from educationalists in pedagogy linked to space planning and use. Many of our schools open on to sheltered outdoor spaces, such as Lanterns Children’s Centre, Winchester (pictured), and Old Basing Infant School, Basingstoke (also pictured).
We try to place schools, such as PinewoodInfant School (pictured), at the heart of a community, where it can be used by the neighbourhood. In our role as landowner, we have the opportunity to develop schools that integrate into the urban setting. In this way, we can promote the co-location of services and a sense of community cohesion.
We value existing structures. For Burnham Copse Primary School (pictured), Basingstoke, walkways were added to allow first-floor access and to shade classrooms. Whiteley Primary School (pictured), Fareham, typifies our use of monopitch sections to cross-ventilate classrooms and let in light.
Both internally and externally, the layout of the building and its wider site, the materials used and the displays of children’s work all contribute to the educational experience.
In the 1950s Jonas Salk was working on a cure for polio in the basement of a Pittsburgh laboratory. Stymied and discouraged, he went to Assisi, Italy and wandered around a 13rd-century monastery. There, among the cloisters, he felt his mind unwind. Fresh lines of pursuit came to him, including the breakthrough that led to the vaccine.
Salk was convinced that the monastery had influenced his mind. So convinced, in fact, that he solicited the architect Louis Kahn to design the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in hopes that other scientists might benefit from serene surroundings.
Sixty years later Salk's hunch is now backed up by empirical evidence as new research in neuroscience hints at how our surroundings affect feelings and behavior. In the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Emily Anthes describes how ceiling height, colors and other design factors influence attention and creativity. Scientists are just beginning to address these questions, in part by studying changes in brain activity as subjects make their way through virtual reality rooms.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects--sofas, watches, etc.--subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, blue is the color.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, blue is the color.
Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor at the Carlson School of Management has found that ceiling height also affects brain function. High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. "If you're in the operating room, maybe a low ceiling is better," she said. "You want the surgeon getting the details right."
Are we hard-wired to dislike minimal interiors? A joint study by MIT and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health suggests that clutter increases the "memorability" of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. In other words, a generous scattering of objects generates a fondness for the place.
According to forecasts of the GIEC (Intergovernmental group on the evolution of the climate), the ocean level should rise from 20 to 90 cm during the 21st Century with a status quo by 50 cm (versus 10 cm in the 20th Century). Award-winning Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut visions Lilypad as a permanent refuge for those whose homes have been submerged in water due to ocean rise caused due to global warming.
The ‘Lilypad City’ can house 50,000 inhabitants and would float around the world as an independent and fully self-sutainable luxurious super home. With lakes, artificial mountains for scenery, solar panels, wind tunnels and powerstations to harness wave energy, and no roads and no cars, Lilypad looks one clean green mega city.
The hotel uses geothermal energy for electricity and heat, a green roof, and natural cooling properties of the quarry itself and yeah, Bungee jumping for guests!
You got to say Atkins did an awesome job. In case you are rubbing your chin thinking that the name does sound familiar, these are the guys who built the Burj Al Arab.
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