London, United Kingdom

Designed by Henley Halebrown, Hackney New Primary School & 333 Kingsland Road represents an exemplary approach to hybrid architecture combining different functions without losing the strengths of either the original educational or residential building typologies.

The project has been awarded a 2023 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies.

Commissioned by Downham Road, the architects were asked to design a hybrid building combining a 350-pupil primary school and 68 affordable homes on a former fire station site within the Kingsland Road Conservation Area.

The 11-story apartment block protects the 3-story school from the street’s noise and fumes. Its compact plan frees up much of the site for the school and its generous courtyard.

At the school’s heart, the courtyard conjures up an inner world at a reduced scale for children.

The party distributes the program to the site’s perimeter to carve out the largest possible courtyard and substitutes internal corridors for open galleries that wrap around it.

The result is an efficient plan (high net to gross), healthy circulation, and a direct relationship between inside and outside space.

Each classroom is given a “shopfront” to the courtyard – something the youngest reception pupils take quite literally.

The galleries orientate and organize the school on all levels. Children and teachers alike move from one activity to another in the open air, making it easy for pupils to understand and staff to passively survey.

The courtyard model is both sustainable and economical, with no corridors making it possible to fund additional teaching spaces and design a smaller building.

Pairs of dual-aspect classrooms are connected with double doors so each year group of 50 children can learn together.

Learning spaces all focus inward towards the courtyard, overlooking one another, with a reception at ground level, years 1-4 at the first-floor level, and years 5-6 on the second floor.

Looking beyond learning to the way space shapes interaction, the architects conjure up moments that facilitate association and friendship.

Next to the school entrance and forming a buffer to the road, the hall is lit by a clerestory, and its blind ground floor façade is marked by a south-facing bench on the street.

Here, parents can sit and chat whilst waiting for their children. Such spaces rooted into the fabric of the building embed social patterns into the architecture, the wall becoming a form of social infrastructure.

The apartment building (333 Kingsland Road) clusters eight dwellings per floor around a central octagonal stair, with three duplex maisonettes and a communal rooftop garden.

Its plan is symmetrical about a diagonal axis as it turns towards a diagonal street leading into the De Beauvoir Town Conservation Area.

Loggias set within the masonry facades run the full height of the building.

These spaces mediate between household and city, providing generous outside space, far exceeding minimum standards.

The interrelationship of façade and structure, and their depth, define the building. The combination of masonry walls and loggias provides dignified robustness and thresholds to inhabit.

The building is predominantly red brick, with elements – columns, beams, stringcourses, and parapets – of precast concrete, the deep red color derived from the red granite aggregate and red sand.

Project: Hackney New Primary School & 333 Kingsland Road
Architects: Henley Halebrown Architects
Lead Architects: Noel Cash and John Marshall
General Contractor: Thornsett Group PLC.
Client: Downham Road Ltd.
Photographers: Nick Kane, Lorenzo Zandri, Ståle Eriksen, and Simon Henley