Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s boarding house for Badminton School is quietly ambitious, writes Kaye Alexander. Photography by Edmund Sumner.
There’s the money shot!’ says Piers Taylor, as we pull up in a narrow lane on the edge of Bristol, where I have come to see Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s new boarding house at Badminton School for girls. The tableau that practice director Taylor has framed for me in the car windscreen is an arresting sight: the untreated timber-clad first and second floors of the building provocatively cantilevering over the school’s stone boundary wall; the project’s bulk, and with it all notion of scale and context, obscured by a tree. This is the view where the many little victories of the project come together.
Bath-based Mitchell Taylor Workshop was formed in 2005, and its Moonshine residence, home to Taylor, won this year’s AJ Small Projects Awards. This building, named Sanderson House, has proved testing for the firm. Mitchell Taylor Workshop secured the commission on its formation in 2005, but two years of negotiating a site strategy in the already cluttered campus delayed any real design work. Project architect Kris Eley describes the multi-headed client (bursar, board of governors, parents, headteacher and boarding mistresses) as ‘a difficult beast to satisfy’. And despite Hugh Casson, architecture director of the 1951 Festival of Britain, having designed the school’s 1960s-built library, Mitchell Taylor Workshop was dealing with an essentially conservative client, evidenced by the prim grounds in which the campus sits.
The client’s vague request for ‘a sustainable building’ was seized upon by Mitchell Taylor Workshop as a vehicle for satisfying its own design agenda. While Badminton School may not appreciate the subtle detailing required to make what is essentially a lightweight box perform well energy-wise, it did grasp the realities of natural ventilation and lighting – a combined-heat-and-power unit that is capable of powering most of the school, and unrestricted internal spaces created by absorbing the steel frame into super-insulated walls.
There’s the money shot!’ says Piers Taylor, as we pull up in a narrow lane on the edge of Bristol, where I have come to see Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s new boarding house at Badminton School for girls. The tableau that practice director Taylor has framed for me in the car windscreen is an arresting sight: the untreated timber-clad first and second floors of the building provocatively cantilevering over the school’s stone boundary wall; the project’s bulk, and with it all notion of scale and context, obscured by a tree. This is the view where the many little victories of the project come together.
Bath-based Mitchell Taylor Workshop was formed in 2005, and its Moonshine residence, home to Taylor, won this year’s AJ Small Projects Awards. This building, named Sanderson House, has proved testing for the firm. Mitchell Taylor Workshop secured the commission on its formation in 2005, but two years of negotiating a site strategy in the already cluttered campus delayed any real design work. Project architect Kris Eley describes the multi-headed client (bursar, board of governors, parents, headteacher and boarding mistresses) as ‘a difficult beast to satisfy’. And despite Hugh Casson, architecture director of the 1951 Festival of Britain, having designed the school’s 1960s-built library, Mitchell Taylor Workshop was dealing with an essentially conservative client, evidenced by the prim grounds in which the campus sits.
The client’s vague request for ‘a sustainable building’ was seized upon by Mitchell Taylor Workshop as a vehicle for satisfying its own design agenda. While Badminton School may not appreciate the subtle detailing required to make what is essentially a lightweight box perform well energy-wise, it did grasp the realities of natural ventilation and lighting – a combined-heat-and-power unit that is capable of powering most of the school, and unrestricted internal spaces created by absorbing the steel frame into super-insulated walls.
Architects: Mitchell Taylor Workshops
Photographs:Edmund Sumner