Largest piece of East Ayrshire’s £70m jigsaw opens in August

Hochtief is steaming ahead to complete work on what will be the largest of the four schools in East Ayrshire’s mammoth school rebuilding programme.

The £70m project will provide two large new secondary/primary combined campuses and one new primary school.

More than 1,800 pupils will use the largest school, Grange Campus, which brings together the existing Grange Academy and Annanhill Primary and Park Schools.

An interesting design feature of the Grange Campus is its ‘street’, a dramatic top-lit, bright and airy space.

All the buildings are steelframe structures and feature a number of canopies.

A consortium of Hochtief PPP Solutions/Nord LB with Parr Architects became preferred bidder for the project in December 2005.

The designs are for two large combined secondary/primary campuses and one new primary school in Kilmarnock, and a major extension and reconfiguration of Mauchline Primary School. All four schools are due to be completed by August 2008.

As part of the design process, Parr Architects carried out an extensive consultation with teachers, pupils and community groups to find out what was important to them in the design of their new schools. The views gathered during these sessions were taken into account as the plans progressed, with East Ayrshire Council very positive about the outcome.

The largest school, Grange Campus, which opens in August, will bring together Grange Academy, Annanhill Primary School and Park School, which caters for children with special educational needs.

• St Joseph’s Campus, which opened in April, will accommodate over 1,200 primary and secondary pupils, with a nursery located in the drum beneath the copper-clad conical Oratory.

• The new Shortlees Primary School, which opened last October, will replace a school building that is of great importance to the local community, and will therefore provide extensive community facilities.

• Mauchline Primary School’s 19th century existing building was fully refurbished and was also opened in October last year. The extension added a sympathetic extension to provide a new gymnasium, assembly hall, administration facilities and a nursery.

Each school includes facilities for local people, such as community halls, learning facilities and sports amenities, to help the buildings become focal points for the surrounding communities.

In developing the designs, Parr Architects has sought to provide an attractive working environment with plenty of natural daylight and ventilation. Every opportunity has been taken to introduce daylight to the buildings, via glazed walls, rooflights, clerestorys and perimeter glazing. In each of the two large campuses, a toplit internal ‘street’ becomes the heart of the building, providing the main social space and dining area, as well as the primary circulation zone.

Flexibility was another key design consideration. Movable partitions have been used extensively between spaces such as Assembly Halls and Gymnasiums, and also between certain classrooms, ensuring that staff and pupils have a wide variety of use permutations to choose from.