Beech Court

Beech Court Pavilion at Abingdon School is a café and multi-purpose space connecting the existing Amey Theatre to the main school.

The dynamic roof shape of the new pavilion is designed to appear as lightweight as possible with its sculpted form complementing the geometry of the Amey Theatre’s pitched roofs. The steel framing of the building creates two primary arches with beams at the folds of the faceted roof. Slender columns support the primary beams and perimeter torsion beams that in turn support a projecting eaves frame. The arched structure penetrates the facade and is read outside of the building. Thermal bridging is mitigated by incorporating a thermal break at the façade interface.

The frame is infilled with a triangular grillage of glulam elements. These have been conceived as clear-spanning between beams or reciprocal to simplify glulam-to-glulam connections.