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FIRST LOOK
9 October 2023
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Simon Kennedy
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Simon Kennedy
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rachel Ferriman
Source: Rivington Street Studios
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Situated at the heart of an emerging community in east London’s Royal Docks, Oasis Academy Silvertown is a secondary school for up to 600 students
The building is arranged as a multistorey ‘superblock’. It incorporates outdoor social space at different levels and a full-sized sports pitch on its roof.
Oasis Academy Silvertown is the only secondary school in the Royal Docks, catering for its growing residential community. It holds a role beyond being a school, aligning with a comprehensive masterplan aimed at expanding housing in the vicinity.
The school had previously been located in temporary accommodation, expanding from three forms of entry to four once the new building opened.
The site is surrounded by a mix of red brick residential properties, derelict industrial land and vast stretches of masterplanned residential and commercial properties. The design aims to stand out from this landscape, its white bricks giving it a monumental quality, highlighting that it is for the community and not a housing block.
The white brickwork and large openings establish a dialogue with both the existing and new residential schemes, as well as offering architectural cohesion with the adjacent listed Silo D Folds – its external walls creating a layered façade in response.
At 0.25ha, the site was well below DfE guidance size – even by inner-city school standards. The design team had to be innovative to deliver an entire school within the physical space available. The building almost completely occupies the site’s footprint with a deep-planned building; its main hall and dining hall at its centre with teaching spaces arranged around.
Source:Rachel Ferriman
A colonnade to the North Woolwich Road visitor entrance creates a civic quality to that side of the building. A colourful, lightweight infill at ground level allows for pedestrian movement with a deep threshold between the public and secure school environment.
As the building occupies the majority of the footprint, it was essential to maximise formal and informal external areas for students. There are active external space to play sports (including the rooftop multi-use games area) and quieter, sheltered spaces for pupils who prefer to socialise, read or eat.
Canted brick fins alongside planting provide screening to prevent overlooking and act as a buffer to noise and overlooking to neighbouring properties.
Source:Rachel Ferriman
Oasis Academy Silvertown opened seven years before the building opened, with students being taught in temporary cabins. Rivington Street Studio was appointed to the project in August 2017 after a previous design team was unable to make the design work.
The building is BREEAM Excellent for its intensive use of an urban site, using a fabric-first approach, thermal mass and LZC technologies.
On-site renewable energy is provided in the form of 200m² of solar PV panels, providing 13 per cent of the building’s required energy, and contributing to a 42 per cent carbon emission reduction (over Pt L2A 2013).
The scheme increases biodiversity within the constraints of a tight inner-city site. A garden and planters green the roof terraces while planted beds provide interest at ground floor, softening the boundary at street level. Two native flowering trees in front of the building define a memorial area for fallen firefighters who worked in the fire station that formerly occupied the site. Bird boxes and bee bricks were also included to provide habitat enhancement, increasing potential nesting sites for locally declining wildlife.
Source:Rachel Ferriman
Oasis Academy Silvertown is built on the former Silvertown Fire Station Site. The site offered only 50 per cent of the gross interior floor area required for a four-form-entry school. Therefore, any school development on this site had to rely on a compact multistorey building with an ambitious design to maximise the amount of outdoor play and social space.
Decades of experience in education design has informed us that there are a number of space types and themes that contribute to successful school design. In addition to general learning settings, other spaces of key importance include common shared spaces and exploratory spaces. With this in mind, it was important to us that common spaces were celebrated and located centrally at the ‘heart’ of the school with teaching spaces and offices arranged around them.
The external spaces were planned on the upper levels, including a two-storey terrace and a rooftop multi-use games area, which benefits from impressive views across east London.
The site itself is an ‘in-between’ area, surrounded by low-rise housing on three sides and a vast residential masterplan on one side. The wider area is largely industrial. We felt that we had the opportunity to knit these conditions together.
We chose brick for its familiar quality and domestic scale, and chose a warm white so as not to replicate the buff and red brick apartment buildings nearby but to stand out as a civic building. The brick walls are folded to provide a layered façade in response to the sun (and rain on the external play deck). A memorial area has also been incorporated into the forecourt, a homage to firefighters from the former fire station who sadly lost their lives in action.
Having spent their first few years in temporary accommodation it was important that the new Oasis Academy Silvertown expressed permanence and presence, and offered a welcoming and inspiring environment to its students. Having visited the school at the end of their first year in their new home, we feel we have delivered on those aspirations.
Éimear Murphy, associate director, Rivington Street Studio
We are delighted to be in this beautiful building and to be able to make the most of these state-of-the-art facilities that are transforming our students’ learning.
Johanna Thompson, then principal, Oasis Academy Silvertown
Start on site August 2020
Completion date August 2022
Gross internal floor area 5,769m²
Gross (internal + external) floor area 7,507m²
Form of contract Two-stage design and build
Construction cost Undisclosed
Architect Rivington Street Studio
Client Department for Education
Structural engineer Jacobs (stages 2-3), Ingleton Wood (stages 4-5)
M&E consultant Jacobs (stages 2-3), Anderson Green (stage 4), T-Clarke (stage 5)
Quantity surveyor Jacobs (stages 1-3), Morgan Sindall (stages 4-6)
Soft landscape Wynne Williams Associates
Fire engineer Zeta
BREEAM consultant Anderson Green
CDM co-ordinator Playle & Partners
FF&E consultant Chalk Creatives
Main contractor Morgan Sindall
CAD software used Revit
Percentage of floor area with daylight factor >2% Data not available
Percentage of floor area with daylight factor >5% Data not available
On-site energy generation 13%
Annual mains water consumption 2.73 m3/occupant
Airtightness at 50Pa 3 m3/h.m2
Heating and hot water load 23.8 kWh/m2/yr
Overall area-weighted U-value 0.36 W/m2K
Design life Not calculated
Embodied / whole-life carbon 737 kgCO2eq/m2 (FCBS Carbon Calculator)
Annual CO2 emissions 9.8 kgCO2eq/m2
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