Concrete, Camera, Collaboration
Photographing schools can be a tricky business. The light’s rarely where you want it, the timetable waits for no lens, and there’s always a danger of being run over by a lacrosse team. But Burntwood School? That was a joy.
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and I go back a long way—long enough to know that when they say “it’s a school”, they mean something quite different from your average brick box with a few splurges of well intentioned graffiti.
At Burntwood, the brief was deceptively simple: upgrade a mid-century modernist girls’ school in south-west London, retain the good bits (by Sir Leslie Martin, so no free pass on that task), and add six new buildings to make the whole campus complete and ready for contemporary demands.
Being AHMM they managed the task brilliantly. And photographing it was like photographing a bold and confident sculpture garden.
There’s a quiet audacity in how AHMM approached the site. Six new pavilions—four teaching blocks, a sports hall, and performing arts building—dropped into a mature landscape with the precision of chess pieces. Each one cut from a language of precast concrete, beautifully faceted to catch London’s mercurial daylight in the most subtle and intriguing ways. Every elevation maps perfectly onto the 7.5m structural module: light, grid, geometry, all poised and balanced.
Inside, it’s all about daylight, scale, and rhythm. Classrooms arranged with a straightforward calm and rationality, easy to read, easy to navigate. Classrooms are interrupted by generous voids and double-height moments that break the pattern. A corridor becomes a gallery. A corner turns theatrical. This is a school that understands the drama of the everyday.
Photographically, the whole thing behaves. It aligns. It frames itself. You don’t chase compositions at Burntwood—they present themselves. The regularity of the plan meets the sculptural ambition of the façade, and somewhere in the interplay, you get images that carry the architecture’s intelligence forward.
It’s no surprise it won the 2015 RIBA Stirling Prize, or that it continues to win post-occupancy praise (and awards). What’s more impressive is how the school functions: a resource for the community, flexible enough to adapt without fuss, and energy efficient without aesthetic compromise. Those concrete panels? Twenty percent GGBS cement replacement and airtight.
Helen Dorfman, the then-Principal, said they wanted a scheme that looked forward while honouring the past. That’s a fine ambition—and one that many projects murmur but few manage to articulate so fluently in form and function.
We’ve shared a few design adventures over the years, AHMM and I. Some grand, some gritty, some gloriously complex. Burntwood, though, felt like a homecoming; years of experience, craft, insight and understanding, effortlessly performed. A masterclass.
