MAYBURY PRIMARY SCHOOL

City of Edinburgh Council

The challenge

Maybury is the first of three new Primary Schools we are delivering for the City of Edinburgh Council along with partners Faithful+Gould, Architype and Rybka. The school has been designed to Passivhaus Standards following the client’s brief for superior energy efficiency and a fully certified, quality assured build process. A flagship school, the client sought to develop teaching environments that had been trialled elsewhere in the city, with a real focus on open plan teaching spaces and ensuring direct access from these teaching spaces to the surrounding external spaces.

Our solution

The open plan nature and the ideology behind Passivhaus led us, as a Design Team, to a hybrid frame construction which draws upon the strengths of four key structural frame materials: standard timber frame panelling, glulam sections, cross laminated timber and steel. The superstructure is supported by a raft foundation allowing simple and practice thermal for air tightness and cold bridge detailing. The raft was also the most efficient means to found the building given relatively poor ground conditions.

There has been a great focus on the external environment of the school leading to a significant collaboration between the landscape architect and ourselves. In particular, the integration of SuDS and water management within the landscape context has been very well integrated and considered.