EBBA’s pop-up construction school starts on Olympic Park site

Work has started on EBBA Architects’ temporary construction skills school on the edge of the Olympic Park in Stratford, east LondonThe five-year project will be run by the Construction Industry Training Board and The Skills Centre and aims to provide ‘valuable skills-based hands-on learning to local people’, says the emerging practice.EBBA Architects was appointed to the project after an invited competition in mid-2019 and the scheme was granted planning permission later that year.The brief called for a low-cost solution to ‘dressing’ three temporary classroom blocks on the site, which have been donated to the project.EBBA’s designs include a simple larch timber wrapping that requires limited maintenance and can be adjusted to fit the repurposed cabins. This consists of frames and screens that clad the exterior, giving a sense of the buildings ‘being made of an assembly of components’.The system can be disassembled, recycled and re-used for other park elements, ranging from furniture, balustrades and accessible ramps to branding and signage.Proposals also include landscaping around the site and a boundary treatment to the western edge of the site as a gateway to people approaching the Olympic Park on foot from Hackney Wick Overground station.The project is due to complete in April 2021.