Cypress Infants School is located on
a steep hillside surrounded by woodlands. Our brief was to retain the existing unloved nursery building;
Architecture and Landscape Design
Cypress Children's Centre: Extension of existing nursery building
'Erect Architecture's attention to detail; their use of colour and natural light; ensuring the building compliments the outdoor surroundings and offers ease of movement throughout, have led to a design which promotes the feeling of well being and harmony with visitors and users commenting on how energising the building feels.'
Nicole Godetz, headteacher
and extend and transform it into a welcoming Children’s Centre that enables the school to offer services for families with children from pregnancy to the age of twelve.
The Children’s Centre extension embraces the existing nursery. Covered external terraces provide space for covered, fluid inside/ outside play.
'It is a decidedly eccentric composition, with some of the timber-framed madness of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hexenhaus, or the angular material collisions of Frank Gehry’s early houses. Typical of Erect Architecture’s playful, yet grounded, approach, it is both utterly logical and considerably dreamy.'
Oliver Wainwright, Building Design
Pitched roofs give identity and generous heights to rooms of different sizes.
The trusses of the existing building are exposed. New rooflights bring daylight into its deep plan.
‘Erect
Architecture’s joyful reinvention of a nursery building in South Norwood,
London, has a lot to teach us about working with existing buildings and
systems.’
Oliver Wainwright, Building Design
The
play terraces open up an area of the school grounds that was previously
inaccessible and unused for outdoor learning and play… not only for the
children, but for the whole community.
The project won an RIBA Award and was nominated for Brick and 3R Awards. Our client, the headteacher of Cypress Schools, was nominated for the RIBA Client of the Year Award.