Circulation takes centre stage as de Blacam and Meagher cut a dynamic sequence of voids, roof lanterns and overlapping corridors into an Irish state secondary school
The historic grounds of Moore Abbey House seem an unlikely place to put a state secondary school. The former seat of the earls of Drogheda, it is a curated landscape of pastures and mature woodland, stretching out from the southern edge of Monasterevin in County Kildare. De Blacam and Meagher Architects has addressed this by treating the new St Paul’s School – a co-educational facility for 850 pupils –as an “object in the landscape”, a bit like a country house. “This is a big school for Ireland and it’s set against this big backdrop,” says Andy Richardson, partner at de Blacam and Meagher. “We didn't want a fiddly looking building.”
The first view of the two-storey building is of a near windowless, white-rendered front elevation, with a blue-glazed brick clock offering a clue as to the building’s function. It is approached from an angle, echoing the sweeping driveway of a country estate. An opening in the facade between the clock and a cylindrical stairwell invites visitors into a central courtyard.
The school is arranged in a C-shaped plan around this open space. Two side wings house most of the classrooms, while the rear wing is the entrance and reception, leading to the main hall, library and more teaching spaces. The mysterious, blank-faced volume that semi-encloses the front of the courtyard turns out to be the sports hall.
“Placing the entrance at the back of the courtyard changed the whole dynamic,” says Richardson. “The courtyard is not just a dead space, it’s used all the time and holds the school together. It’s big enough to hold events in but not so big that you feel lost in it.”
Scale was a key preoccupation for the architects, and this led to the choice of a concrete frame. “We wanted it to have a bit of weight,” says Richardson. “It needed that sort of mass to pin it down.” The reinforced-concrete frame was cast in situ, apart from the first-floor slabs, which are 225mm precast hollowcore units. The in-situ concrete has been left exposed in various areas, notably the circulation zones. “If you painted or plastered it, it would lose all sense of materiality. It seemed important to have something that was grounded.”
Each wing is arranged around a 4m-wide central spine, with classrooms on either side. The generous width of this space has allowed the architects to offset the ground and first-floor corridors and carve out overlaps and double-height voids. In the “social areas” where two wings meet, the concrete walls rise up more than 6m.
The architects have given a rhythm to the corridors by inserting a roof lantern every 14m, directly above a pair of classroom doors. “The difficulty with schools is just the sheer number of rooms. The rooflights create an overriding order, which helps to kill the scale a bit,” says Richardson. There are 12 lanterns in total, each 5m x 4m in area and more than 6m above the first-floor landings. The size of the structures allows daylight to flood in, framing the classroom entrances and spilling down through the voids to the ground-floor corridors. They can also be opened at night to “reset” the concrete structure’s thermal mass, an essential part of the natural cooling strategy.
The concrete structure makes a similarly dramatic appearance in the main hall and sports hall. Exposed downstand beams, 1.5m deep, march across the 18m span of the sports hall roof at 3m intervals. Acoustic foam panels are suspended between the beams. At one end of the hall, three perpendicular beams cut across this structure to form a cruciform rooflight, 6m x 7m in area and rising 2m above the roofline. The main hall is on a slightly smaller scale, with the beams spanning 15m and tapering slightly to follow the gentle pitch of the roof.
Throughout the school, most of the shuttering was made using standard 2.4m x 1.2m panels on a proprietary steel-framed system. Phenolic-faced plywood gives it a smooth texture. Under the lanterns, however, the team managed to stretch the budget to a more bespoke finish. Timber-framed formwork allowed for greater control of the joint and tie-hole layouts, while wood veneer plywood shuttering has added a delicate grain pattern to the finish, which is illuminated under the daylight.
All of the in-situ concrete contained 40% GGBS. Its pale colour is complemented by the blockwork used for the inner leaf of the insulated cavity walls, piers and classrooms, which was left exposed and painted white. Rust-red resin flooring throughout makes for a striking contrast.