< close
Project: West Buckland School
Publication: Architects Journal
Date: May 2010
Download PDF
Rundell Associates adds to Devon's plethora of architectural styles with a timber-clad arts centre the complements the existing 19th-century West Buckland School and adds some coherence to the campus. But where is the masterplan?
By Felix Mara. Photography by Ben Blossom.
The volume on Devon in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series is emphatic: ‘No English county contains so great a variety of building materials as Devon.’ But at Work Stage B of the expansion of West Buckland School near Barnstaple, the architect, Rundell Associates, seized upon an exterior cladding material that was unfamiliar in this part of north Devon: timber boarding.
The client, an independent school that was founded in 1858 to provide a public school education for the sons of farmers and middle-class families, was sceptical. It had bought into the environmental logic of a timber structure at a very early stage. But the London architect had to demonstrate that timber would work as a cladding material on a practical level, and that untreated sawn Siberian larch would sit comfortably next to the local stone facades of the Victorian gothic Karslake Hall when it weathered to a silver-grey finish.
West Buckland School, which comprises a senior and prep schools and a nursery, appointed Rundell Associates in 2006 to design a range of new facilities that opened last month. The completed building provides exemplary teaching facilities for art, design and technology, together with a theatre and drama studio. The school refers to it as the 150 Building because its principal structure, the Grade II-listed Karslake Hall, was completed 150 years ago to designs by prolific local architect Richard Davie Gould.
Publication: Architects Journal
Date: May 2010
Download PDF
Clearing up the Campus
Rundell Associates adds to Devon's plethora of architectural styles with a timber-clad arts centre the complements the existing 19th-century West Buckland School and adds some coherence to the campus. But where is the masterplan?
By Felix Mara. Photography by Ben Blossom.
The volume on Devon in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series is emphatic: ‘No English county contains so great a variety of building materials as Devon.’ But at Work Stage B of the expansion of West Buckland School near Barnstaple, the architect, Rundell Associates, seized upon an exterior cladding material that was unfamiliar in this part of north Devon: timber boarding.
The client, an independent school that was founded in 1858 to provide a public school education for the sons of farmers and middle-class families, was sceptical. It had bought into the environmental logic of a timber structure at a very early stage. But the London architect had to demonstrate that timber would work as a cladding material on a practical level, and that untreated sawn Siberian larch would sit comfortably next to the local stone facades of the Victorian gothic Karslake Hall when it weathered to a silver-grey finish.
West Buckland School, which comprises a senior and prep schools and a nursery, appointed Rundell Associates in 2006 to design a range of new facilities that opened last month. The completed building provides exemplary teaching facilities for art, design and technology, together with a theatre and drama studio. The school refers to it as the 150 Building because its principal structure, the Grade II-listed Karslake Hall, was completed 150 years ago to designs by prolific local architect Richard Davie Gould.
