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Betty Owoo: Edible education

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Bringing us closer to how and where our food is produced

Edible Education is a strategy that proposes a series of sensitively positioned urban landscapes and education spaces that bring us closer to how our food is produced. The tapestry brings together the key elements of the Edible Education scheme and weaves them together into a compelling narrative of the potential of these interwoven landscapes.
The project will create a new collection of buildings including a school, community building and housing, linked by a series of interwoven landscapes, that will serve a wide sector of society with a food- and agricultura-based programme. The school will sit as the centrepiece of the sensitively designed masterplan, as a pristine and crystalline object in a hazy and varied landscape. The buildings will be linked by a variating garden wall.
The buildings sit in a varied landscape that provides different experiential spaces across the site. There are seven landscapes across the site: the shared front garden, the wilderness, the kitchen garden, the internal garden, the internal street, the walled garden and the meadow. Each one has different characteristics and degrees of privacy.
A holistic masterplan for the site set in a rich landscape. A school building with direct links to landscape in the form of external teaching spaces adjacent to classrooms, with a verdant indoor garden at its centre.
The garden wall acts as a datum that connects the hazy landscape to the crystalline geometry of the architecture. The wall becomes especially generous at openings to the community building, whilst on the school facade it acts as more of a skirting to the base of the building. The idea of the wall is derived from medieval walled gardens (hortus conclusus) and how they concealed growing delights within.
The internal garden is a verdant, Eden-like space at the heart of the school - a public square within the building with façades that make a town square.
The classroom modules provide high quality teaching space, with different and unique characteristics on each level of the school.
The classroom modules on the ground floor have a unique and direct connection to the external kitchen gardens and to the internal garden.
The classroom modules on the second floor take advantage of the lofty spaces created by the sawtooth roof profile of the school by using mezzanines.

Location
Woodgrange Road, Forest Gate

Objective
To provide young people and their immediate communities access to quality green space with satellite school sites for a food-focused education based on Edible Schoolyard principles.

Motivation
The project was born out of research into Newham’s existing foodscapes and green spaces, and speculating how these could be enhanced to improve the future health and wellbeing of young people in Newham.

Strategy
A new collection of buildings – including a school, community building and housing – are linked by a series of interwoven landscapes, and serve a wide sector of society with a food and agricultural based programme. A school sits as the centrepiece of the masterplan – a pristine, crystalline object in a hazy and varied landscape. The buildings will be linked by a garden wall.

Impact
At its heart, the project is about the value of urban green spaces, and the impact these can have on our health and wellbeing regardless of their scale.

 

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