Haberdashers’ Girls’ School Project Excelsior

The new facilities provide improved dining accommodation for the entire school and ‘full cook’ facilities. The Junior School has its own Hall / Performance space including a first floor viewing gallery. Dining facilities have been extended to include a 6th Form / Staff mezzanine café and function room. A new LRC is located at 2nd floor level accessible to both Junior & Senior Schools. A generously sized roof terrace is provided at 2nd floor level to enable learning facilities to extend outdoors during the summer months.  A new centralized IT hub, serving the whole school, is accommodated at ground floor level. A basement under part of the ground floor contains the mechanical & electrical services plant and also provides the school with some much needed general storage space.

All floors, including the basement, are accessible by stairs and a lift.

The Excelsior building draws inspiration from the brick aesthetic used in IID’s 1994 Art and Music Building, with dramatic brick fins providing ventilation to the main dining hall space.  The common architectural language is dominated by gently curved and vaulted aluminium standing seam roofs and walling materials which echo the original school buildings (red wire cut facing brickwork and white polyester powder coated aluminium framed windows and external doors). This harmonises the new with the existing original buildings whilst giving them a greater dynamism from the sweeping form of the new roofs.