Project Title: Michael Tippett School
Location: London
Wood Species: SWEET CHESTNUT
Product Description
The Project
A new-build secondary school in Lambeth, the Michael Tippett Special Educational Needs School provides state-of-the-art teaching facilities for 80 pupils and 60 staff. Completed in 2008, it was the first new school in London to be built as part of the Government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. The design team was led by Marks Barfield Architects. Its primary structural innovation lies with the composite timber roof structure.
The building consists of a two-storey, L-shaped front block with a single-storey rear wing. Options appraised early on included a comparison between using loadbearing walls versus a framed structure. However, considering the ever-changing needs of the school users, a framed option with non-loadbearing partitions was the most suitable, due to its inherent adaptability.
External timber columns supporting the roof structure are situated 1.5m outside the building façade so that this is free from primary structure. This allows the external columns to provide support to the brise-soleil, as well as
making them an integral part of the architectural language of the façade and the external space around the building. The latter aspect is particularly relevant around the single-storey wing of the building, where ground-floor classrooms open directly onto the outside. As the special needs pupils will regularly come into contact with the columns, it was felt they should have a ‘tactile’ quality, which would be best provided by the use of timber; this also made sense from a sustainability point of view.
The structural grid was determined largely by considering the optimum classroom proportions and dimensions, with roof beams at 5.4m centres along the longitudinal axis of the building. In order to complement the supporting timber columns, these roof beams were also glulam. However due to roof beam spans of between 9m and 12m, combined with the dead load from precast concrete planks and the sedum roof, the depth of a pure timber section became prohibitively large. The roof beams are therefore flitched to minimise structural depths. The glulam timber components are between 540mm and 675mm deep with a bespoke steel flitch that is ‘cruciform’ in section to provide a support detail for the pre-cast concrete slabs.
BUILDING OWNER: LONDON BOROUGH OF LAMBETH
ARCHITECT: MARKS BARFIELD ARCHITECTS
BUILDER/MAIN CONTRACTOR: THE APOLLO GROUP
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS: GIFFORD
JOINERY: INWOOD DEVELOPMENTS LTD
OTHER ASSOCIATED COMPANY: PINNACLE ESP (SERVICES)
