Setting an aesthetic benchmark at the heart of the regeneration of
London’s Royal Docks, Oasis Academy Silvertown is a new Department for
Education school created by architects Rivington Street Studio.
The landmark building serves 11-16 year olds and achieves a BREEAM
‘Excellent' rating while its striking appearance owes much to the use of
Vandersanden’s Perla bricks.
At the heart of an emerging community in West Silvertown, the
Oasis Academy is an all-inclusive secondary school for 600 students on a
constrained .25-hectare site. Arranged as a multi-storey ‘superblock’, the building incorporates outdoor social space at different
levels and a full-sized sports pitch on its roof.
The warm white Perla brickwork and large openings relate to the
existing and new residential properties and the monumental listed Silo D
nearby. The building’s thick external walls are folded to provide a layered
façade in response to the elements. A double-height colonnade to the North
Woolwich Road acts as a visitor entrance and engenders a civic quality to the
building while also allowing for generous pedestrian movement and a deep
threshold between the public domain and secure school environment.
The site is surrounded by a mix of red brick residential
properties, derelict industrial land and vast stretches of master-planned
residential and commercial properties. “We wanted the Academy to stand out from
this landscape,” explains Éimear Murphy, associate director at Rivington Street
Studio. “Vandersanden’s white
Perla bricks give the building a monumental quality, highlighting that it’s for
the community and is not an apartment block.”
Taylor Maxwell, the brick supplier, suggested Vandersanden’s Perla
brick for the project. “What we really liked about Perla is that it’s not only
a white brick, with no variation in the colour, but it has quite a rustic,
handmade texture that gives it a warm feel rather than a shiny and engineered
surface finish,” says Murphy.
There were various challenges to creating the brickwork details.
The sharp angles associated with the brick fins on the side elevations meant
there were a lot of brick specials so these were scheduled with plans drawn
through the fins at every other course at the different levels. The contractor
then cut the bricks to the schedule. This was made possible because the Perla
bricks are exactly the same colour all the way through.
For the canted reveals of the double-height colonnade to the main
elevation, brick slip panels were used. Rivington Street Studio worked with the
brick subcontractor to develop a bespoke detail and different mock-ups were
trialled. The brick slips are seamless in appearance, matching with the full
bricks used elsewhere.
The canted reveals to the windows on the south elevation were
envisioned through extensive 3D modelling and the Perla bricks again proved
highly versatile during construction.
To achieve a homogenous feel to the building, the mortar was
matched to the brick. From a distance, the structure resembles a white cube
but, as you get closer, the surface detail of the mortar joints and brick
texture starts appearing. At different times of the day, the building’s
appearance changes as patterns of light and shade move across the texture of
the bricks.
"The Vandersanden bricks are incredibly high quality and the
through colour simplified the construction process because the bricks could
simply be cut to suit the building’s geometry, enthuses Murphy. “Another
important factor was the excellent consistency of the batches as this was
essential to achieving the building’s monolithic, one-colour look.”
