My first Building - Deborah Saunt, Director of DSDHA
Architect and director of architecture practice DSDHA Deborah Saunt remembers her first completed building, John Perry Nursery in Dagenham, east London
John Perry Nursery in Dagenham came out of research and speculation, gathering together ideas that question preconceptions of what buildings for children should be. Our commission via a competitive process was to build a new nursery school attached to a primary school on what was then the last page of the A-Z map of London.
The client and head teacher believed that school is the one moment where children can engage with nature and understand their place in the world as members of society.
We therefore made sure that the threshold between inside and out was as permeable as possible and developed the design for a huge cantilever of over 8m in length, and which the children could play outside without any interruption of columns. This developed into the rhetoric of a very strong architecture where the building almost terrifies adults but creates delight for children.
We also tested a new material for the enclosure of the building, polycarbonate Rodeca, which until that time had not been used, which coincided with the Laban Dance Centre in Deptford by Herzog and de Meuron. So we knew we were onto some simultaneously great research with them!
The only painful process I can specifically recall was when the Project Architect returned from site with photographs of the canopy, which we had been expectantly waiting for, only to find that it appeared to be drooping! This meant that 8m of steel was sloping downwards rather than lying horizontally carving its huge shelter through the air and the contractor had been insistent that it didn't really matter and that it was not drooping at all.
We had to go back to site and ask them to dismantle the cantilever, which as a novice architect was quite a Herculean request. There was some argument about the cost involved that we subsequently proved along with the structural engineer that the structure was indeed leaning downwards by over 10cm and the fault lay with the contractor.
It felt amazing to see the building emerge. Especially important was the day that the nursery opened and the first children were allowed to come in and test out the space. They ran around laughing, playing and screaming with delight at the discoveries they made and climbing all over the bespoke concrete landscape and play equipment that we had made in the large garden that lay beyond the cantilevered canopy, which had been inspired by Barbara Hepworth's garden at her studio in Cornwall.
The building is especially important to us because the client consequently asked us to make another building for them at the same site, a larger children centre, and then William Bellamy School nearby. Therefore, this first building was the start of a long-term relationship, which underscored our future ability to win projects in the future, and for me is testament to the incredible risks that clients take in supporting new designers.
