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

NIALL MCLAUGHLIN WRITES LA ARTICLE FOR ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW

SEPTEMBER 2013

Niall McLaughlin has written an article for the Architectural Review, entitled ‘Street Life: Michael Maltzan’s Social Housing in Los Angeles’. The piece examines the history of the infamous area of LA known as Skid Row and three housing projects by the practice Michael Maltzan Architecture for this fractured part of the city. The piece draws out common themes between the projects, which are all low-cost accommodation for the previously homeless, exploring the successful spatial relationships between the private space of the individual rooms, the areas of common sheltered space and the public realm of the street.

“The formal virtuosity of each composition is Maltzan’s own special skill and they suggest that high architecture can give pleasure and dignity to all of us….I hope that the different spatial experiments, linking and articulating pavement, common sheltered space and private rooms, will become subjects for further reflection and analysis. It speaks of our common need to situate ourselves and participate in public life.” NM