Brunswick Park Primary School, Camberwell, 1962 by Stirling and Gowan
A short account of James Stirling and James Gowan’s Dining and Assembly Hall for a school in Camberwell, South London — designed at the same time as their seminal University of Leicester Engineering Building
I stumbled upon this gem of a building as I tried to make a shortcut while walking to Camberwell from Kennington, where I live. Getting more and more lost in the drab and largely nondescript housing estates, I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by the startling abstract geometry of Stirling and Gowan’s little dining and assembly hall, even in its current rather run-down and weather-beaten state.
The building dates from 1961–62, around the time James Stirling and James Gowan, both still in their thirties, were working on their seminal Engineering Building at Leicester University — and one can see similar principles informing this little building in Camberwell as in their more celebrated work. As at Leicester, this is a building intended to be seen in the round. It has no principal façade, rather four quadrants: three wedge-shaped with glass faces and sloping roofs behind; and one flat-roofed section to the north-west (complete with corner chimney), which acts as a service wing. The effect is mildly disorientating. Each side of the building appears to be different yet conjoined in a swirling vortex of geometry that erupts from the landscaped grass banks on which the building sits.
As I walked around the building, its volumes appeared to be in motion. The horizontal and verticals of the glass walls gave way to the intersecting angles of their supporting side walls and sloping roofs, and vice versa, while the crevice-like paths, which cut through the landscaped banks that lead to the buildings’ entrances, appeared and then disappeared in an alternating frequency. The effect was oddly intensified by the simple detailing: the red brick coping running atop the yellow brick sidewalls, and the way the the glass walls wrap around at their sides, making it look like the each glass frame is actually part of a separate volume that’s been slotted into a brick shell. This is glazing handled in the way that only Stirling and Gowan could do: glass treated as both material to define a geometric volume and also as transparent ‘immaterial’, suggestive of a void between robust brick and concrete. Here, it is but a taster of the brilliant geometric (and technological) audacity of Leicester.
Alas, I couldn’t get inside. Although I am told the building’s interior is no less interesting. There, the combination of complex, intersecting geometries and an almost ascetic use of brick, combined with a timber roof, herringbone blocked floor, would surely only enhance the powerful lighting effects of those great walls of glass.
The building was apparently originally intended as a much larger annex to the old red brick Victorian school across the way. It is rather fitting, though, that the Dining and Assembly Hall — spaces where the whole school can come together — were the only part completed. Even today, Stirling and Gowan’s radical vision marks their building off as something out the ordinary, a celebration of the social life of the school.
© Owen Hopkins 2018
