London-based studio Walters & Cohen has completed The Rausing Science Centre for The King’s School in Canterbury, Kent, reinterpreting the area’s historic flint, oak, and limestone materials in a modern context.
The Rausing Science Centre introduces six science classrooms and a lecture hall with seating for 120, on the site previously occupied by Mitchinson’s Day House—a building constructed in 1982 by the former British studio Maguire and Murray. That building was demolished after Historic England declined its listing application.
Due to its sensitive position next to one of only two entrances into Canterbury’s historic cathedral precincts, Walters & Cohen sought to combine the area’s traditional materials and gabled forms with a “crisp and contemporary” design approach.
Connecting to the school’s existing laboratories in the neighbouring Grade II-listed Parry Hall—which Walters & Cohen has also refurbished—the new building is linked via a glazed passageway.
“The cathedral precincts feature a fine-grained Normandy limestone called Caen stone, flint, oak, and clay tiled roofs,” co-founder Cindy Walters explained to Dezeen.
“We adopted the same palette but detailed them in a crisp, contemporary way,” Walters said. “The project required several Scheduled Ancient Monument Applications, extensive discussions with the Cathedral Fabric Commission for England, and a nine-month pause for a detailed archaeological excavation.”
Facing the street and the precinct entrance, the building’s flint exterior features two rows of windows framed with pale stone and oak, all beneath a traditional gabled red-clay tiled roof.
Embedded in the flint facade is a subtle motif inspired by the DNA sequence of an artichoke—horizontal bands of square knapped flint stand out against the surrounding irregular snapped flint.
On the
