Nicholas Hare Architects faced a design review panel of formidable parents for its Golden Lane Campus of children's facilities in Islington: fellow practitioners Liza Fior (Muf) Mike Tonkin (Tonkin Liu) and Soraya Khan (Theis and Khan) as well as former Architecture Foundation director and school governor Lucy Musgrave, who had instigated a design competition for the project. 'They were a very vibrant, strong-minded set of governors,' says Nicholas Hare partner Jayne Bird. 'They came up with fantastic comments... we went further with the design than we would've normally. It was daunting, but fun and interesting.' The brief was complicated too: a campus for multiple users, bringing together a primary school (Prior Weston), the primary department of a special needs school (Richard Cloudesley), and a preschool (Fortune Park Nursery) but also serving the broader community through stay-and-play facilities, a cafe, meeting rooms and therapy resources such as a hydrotherapy room used not only by special needs pupils but by others outside school hours, such as stroke rehabilitation patients.
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