Ballinamore Community School

Ballinamore Secondary School is situated on the outskirts of a market town in the north west of Ireland on a sloping site. The new 500 pupil school is arranged in 3 cranked blocks. The site is bounded by trees and streams and opens to views of distant fields connecting you to the colours of rural Ireland, brown, green, blacks, yellows, reds, changing through the seasons.

The two main classroom blocks fold out to make a generous and welcoming entrance court. The building is painted a vivid green to emphasise the bold volumes and integrate with their backdrop of hills and fields. The school builds the site, excavating and filling, making a pitch, experimentation & external teaching areas, poly-tunnels, bog gardens & raised beds to generate a stimulating external teaching environment while also re-shaping the geography of the site.

Internally the focus is a double-height concourse at the intersection of the volumes with splayed corridors off it cut by courtyards providing light and views. Circulation spaces are unusually generous by Irish school standards and provide additional teaching area outside of the traditional formal classroom setting as well as social areas for table tennis and comfortable seating areas with wifi hot spots.