London Fields Secondary School

A Cultivated Institution: Making a cultural focus in the context of the gentrification of Hackney.

Winner of the RIBA Bronze Medal 2004 and the Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

An institution, such as a school, both restricts and liberates the individual: the restrictions should be counterbalanced by providing for the individual user, and not only for the movement of masses of people. A single, deep-plan block was taken as a challenging starting point for the project of de-institutionalising the institution. Specific points were proposed for achieving this, which were then formulated into a building design, and carefully thought of within the more general social and political context, as well as within the more specific context of the site on London Fields in Hackney. Two educational establishments: a secondary school and a pupil referral unit were proposed to form a cluster with the existing primary school and nursery.

The project consciously attempted to find a balance between the various, observed extremes: the ‘institutional’ and the humane; the natural and the artificial; repetition and difference; the physical reality of the park and the virtual reality of the advertisements and signs of the surrounding cityscape; hidden and revealed views; robust and delicate materials; the universal and the particular concerns; and not least importantly, the theoretical and the practical.