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PLANNING GRANTED FOR THE NEW ACADEMIC BUILDING, BEDFORD SCHOOL

OCTOBER 2022

Planning Granted for the New Academic Building, Bedford School

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

KEY NOTE LECTURE AT CONFERENCE ON MODERN SACRED ARCHITECTURE

OCTOBER 2014

Niall McLaughlin has given a keynote lecture on the theme of ‘Sacred Spaces’ as part of a conference on Modern Sacred Architecture in Ireland and Germany, hosted at Newman House in Dublin. The conference was hosted as a collaboration between University College Dublin, Goethe-Institut Ireland and the National College of Art and Design. The other key note lecturers were Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at UCD and Amandus Sattler, principal of the award-wining Munich practice, Allmann Sattler Wappner.

The three day event explored themes of abstraction and innovation, together with conservation and re-use in the design of churches, mosques and synagogues from 1920s to the present day. The lectures and panel discussions focussed on sacred architecture of the period within Ireland and Germany. Niall spoke on themes surrounding the practice’s ecclesiastical work, including the Bishop Edward King Chapel and the Carmelite chapels in London and Dublin.