Planning Granted for the New Academic Building, Bedford School

PLANNING GRANTED FOR THE NEW ACADEMIC BUILDING, BEDFORD SCHOOL

OCTOBER 2022

Arriving at the School via the De Parys Avenue Gates. Visualisation depicting the set-back frontage of the proposed New Academic Building, revealing the Main School Building.

We are delighted that Bedford School have been granted planning permission to build their New Academic Building. The new teaching facility, arranged across two-storeys will host 21 classrooms for Maths, Economics and Computer Science along with smaller rooms for group working and seminars. The building is composed as a chain of simple square teaching volumes arranged around a central breakout and circulation concourse. The facades borrow from the organisational principles and neo-gothic elements of the Main School Building - employing deep reveals, gabled roofs, chimneys and a lantern to create generous, bright and airy spaces for teaching and learning. In front of the new building, there will be a new pedestrianised square with delicate trees and lush low-level planting. To the rear, a series of small villa gardens will be combined to form a larger courtyard garden captured by the existing library and New Academic Building, hosting teaching terraces and verdant spaces for socialising and rest.

Image Credit: Pictureplane

NAZRIN SHAH BUILDING – STEELWORK

JULY 2015

Just over two years since our first tentative steps towards imagining what sort of space a new auditorium for Worcester College might possibly be like, we find ourselves enclosed within a spidery sketch, looking up to the trees through a skeletal enclosure of steel. We watched in excitement as our drawings were scribed across the site, first in neon spray paint and little red sticks, later excavated into deep ravines. We pick our way across the lines that had become so familiar on paper and are now concrete obstacles in a muddy field. The reality of this transition only became real as we stood looking across at the steel columns in this picture. They map out the positions of the stone fins that radiate around the curved facade of the new auditorium, with the sloping beams above us silhouetted against the bright July sky marking the future locations of the sculpted folds to the soffit.