A 19th-century primary school in Dulwich came with the usual set of problems associated with old buildings. To solve them, Edward Cullinan Architects took a pragmatic and piecemeal approach
Rosendale Primary school in Dulwich, south London is like thousands of schools across the country. The 600-pupil Victorian Board school was built in 1899 and has all the familiar architectural features common to the period: tall windows, gable roofs, brown brickwork and red brick dressings.
However, by the start of the 21st century it also had many of the environmental and operational problems familiar to much of the national school building stock. Poor surveillance, inefficient circulation and natural daylight, spiralling energy costs, and classrooms that virtually froze in the winter and often reached a staggering 40°C in the summer.
Recent years have seen various solutions to these problems in British schools come and go. The scrapped ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Schools for the Future programme favoured invasive, procurement-heavy intervention. Current, leaner design and procurement models seek to reduce costs by increasing standardisation.
But at Rosendale, Cullinan Studio has been quietly pursuing an alternative low-cost, incremental and heavily localised improvement approach that, at only £480/m2, could well serve as a cost-effective template for how we improve our school housing stoc