Theatre and Arts Centre, Latymer Upper School

Our long association with Latymer School began when we won an invited competition to design a new Arts Centre in 1995. The building includes a theatre, an art and music school and classrooms, on a site bound by the Great West Road to the south, the residential Rivercourt Road to the east and (at the time) the wall of the school library to the west (now replaced by the Performing Arts Centre). A planning stipulation was that reference should be made to the three nineteenth century villas that had been on the site. We therefore constructed at a scale sensitive to the neighbouring houses and inserted white rendered bays, representing the three houses, into a plain red-brick elevation facing Rivercourt Road. The building is organised around a triple-height atrium which serves as a foyer to the theatre as well as providing an exhibition space.