Image © Architype
The City of Edinburgh Council
April saw the formal lodging of the Planning Application for the new Maybury Primary School in Edinburgh. A real milestone for Etive, this being 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 is being designed to Passivhaus standards following the client’s brief for superior energy efficiency and a fully certified, quality assured build process. The flagship school aims to develop teaching environments that have 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. This 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 practical thermal arrangements for air tightness and cold bridge detailing. The raft was also the most efficient means to found the building given relatively poor ground conditions.
RIBA Stage 4 design is now well underway and we look forward to seeing our work come to fruition on the ground.