maber acted as landscape designers on three new secondary schools as part of the Priority Schools Building Programme: Hertfordshire, Luton and Reading.

 
Location:
Various
Services:

Landscape

Client:
Interserve Kajima
Sector:
Landscape Architecture
Education
 

The landscape design for the HLR Schools have been carefully considered to create schemes that will support a range of experiences and activities suited to the learning programme of the schools, including enhancing the sporting provision.

The external environments contain both hardstanding and soft landscape areas that offer opportunities for learning and social interaction between students – and all can be easily supervised by the teaching and support staff of the schools.

 

The planting and hard landscaping not only complement the buildings, they have created legible, safe, separated and direct routes for pedestrians to the entrance of the schools and provided clear and logical drop off / collection zones for both cars and coaches.

 

Sustainable Urban Drainage

SUDs (Sustainable Urban Drainage) features include swales, on site soak-aways and retention areas to manage water outflow and add value to habitat and planting areas.

 

 

Street Furniture

Street furniture and fencing have been carefully considered to provide a simple yet elegant palette of objects that provides minimal intervention into the space.

 

Soft landscape materials palette

Planting has softened the built forms, humanised the scale, mitigated the microclimate and  provided a seasonal sense of place as well as biodiversity opportunities.

Tree planting in particular extended the landscape structure into the sites by framing key spaces through the planting of boulevards or individual feature trees. A guiding principle on the choice of species was the climate of the site and the existing vegetation.