Rivers Academy West London

Location: Feltham, London TW14

Client: Rivers Academy Wesst London

Project Year: 2013

Cost: £500k - £2m

The main objective here was to add a completely new, modern and welcoming administration and reception area in front of the existing entrance to suit the size of the school today and better encourage parents to access the school and facilitate dealing with visitors. To help achieve this, we injected more feeling of light and colour in order to enhance natural lighting as well as designing a lighting scheme that enhances all features after dark.

The new building is connected to the existing by a minimally framed glazed link that just ‘touches’ the existing building. The idea being that as you pass through the new building and into the glazed link, you are still able to see the entire existing faade due to the transparency of the new link. We also remodelled the existing foyer space and provided new meeting rooms and a teacher training facility within the existing building.

The central raised flat roofed ‘portico’ roof structure is supported on timber-clad columns that reference the materials and colours of the library building that we designed for the same school – previously named Longford Community School. The roof overhangs are very important to control direct sunlight and for the thermal performance of the building.

We designed a Trespa clad structure that sits on top of the existing building frontage and acts a kind of signage ‘beacon’ particularly after dark when it is lit up.

All internal furniture (except chairs) was purpose designed by us.