Warwick Independent Schools Foundation

The masterplan provided a unique opportunity to test how the new accommodation for King’s High School could be delivered to best effect and how the existing resources could be shared more efficiently.

Various options for the site were used to explore the design, massing and placement of new buildings to create both a coherent physical arrangement and academic arrangement of departments. It was particularly important to consider how, on an already densely occupied site, the additional growth could be managed whilst achieving a sense of order and coherence.

The masterplan establishes a strategic framework that gives the Foundation confidence to plan the next chapter of its history and sets out a road map for phased development across the campus.

The new King’s High School consists of a series of separate and smaller, more intimate linked buildings that reduce the overall impact on the site. The massing creates a rich and diverse series of buildings, with a variety of roof forms, unified by their materials and sense of order, which sit comfortably both within the context of the existing school buildings and the wider historic context. The visual impact on the approach to Warwick and the use of a simple palette of materials, sympathetic to the existing context, were key criteria for developing the scheme.