Avanti Architects | Trumpington Community College

Trumpington Community College in Cambridge won a Commendation at this year’s Civic Trust Awards. The awards recognise outstanding architecture, planning and design in the built environment and Trumpington’s Commendation was collected by Avanti Director Amir Ramezani and Associate Director Andrew Phillips.

Trumpington is an innovative school with enhanced community sports provision serving the new urban extension at Great Kneighton. The project is the culmination of a highly collaborative process with the community and three clients – City of Cambridge Education Foundation, Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council. The shared building, landscape and sports facilities reflect the open, community based ethos of the school federation. The project makes an outstanding civic contribution and achieves BREEAM ‘Excellent’.

Trumpington has also been announced as runner up for the Best New Large Building over £2m and the Engineering and Sustainable Project of the Year award at the 2016 CFCI Cambridge Forum for the Construction Industry Awards. Trumpington Community College is a new build 750 pupil school providing shared community sports facilities for the new community at Cley Farm. It is the largest public building in the urban extension of Great Kneighton and the first secondary school to be built in Cambridge in 40 years. Designed around Danish school models with compact planning, the school creates an interactive and connected learning environment with a large proportion of unstructured learning space. The spatial organisation allows a variety of learning activities to take place concurrently within acoustically defined spaces which are also transparent and showcase learning. The school is combined with an autism unit which is integrated on the ground floor following inclusive design principles. Trumpington also has a specialism in science which will be showcased in the interior of the building. The design of the school follows a high sustainability agenda including the school’s commitment to sustainable transport through cycling, walking and the low carbon guided bus. A fenceless boundary also allows residents who live locally to enjoy the outdoor amenity spaces out of hours. Trumpington Community College opened in September 2016 following a community evening that attracted over 500 visitors. The feedback was unanimously positive and this has helped accelerate enrolment of follow-on pupils. At the formal opening of the building by HRH Duke of Gloucester, staff demonstrated how the building radically changed learning and this positive feedback has continued as staff and pupils further engage with the building.