Haileybury School

Haileybury Almaty will be an all-through school providing a British education in Kazakhstan. Haileybury will prepare pupils for GCSE examinations and International Baccalaureate. The school is designed for an initial intake of 640 pupils with the ability to accommodate a maximum of 960 pupils.

HOK International’s initial design for the school responds to four major challenges: speed of construction, long term flexibility, significant seismic risk and a wide climatic range.

The teaching accommodation is arranged in a series of pavilions placed along the contours of a north west facing slope. Teaching spaces are orientated south southeast to exploit the morning sun and views of the neighbouring Tien Shan mountains. Younger pupils will occupy a single storey structure at the south of the site, buildings will then increase in height as pupils move down the slope to a three storey building containing specialist facilities such a science, technology and music.   The simple concrete linear teaching blocks will be linked by a series of rhomboidal spaces under undulating timber and ETFE roof.

The school will be ventilated via an underground thermal labyrinth which takes advantage of the wide diurnal temperature range of the region. The design will exploit the thermal mass of the concrete structures; will employ night time cooling and a CHP system shared with a neighbouring residential area.

Construction is planned to commence in the spring 2007 and the building was opened in September 2008.

From the start of concept HOK used Revit Architecture to develop the design through to detail design. After this a Enka the Turkish main contractor, took the project through to construction Revit was useful for exploring the 3D spaces and complexity on this sloping site together with scheduling the classrooms and equipment to complete the detail design documents. 3ds Max Design was used to link Revit geometry for visualisation.

On the school opening Yi Ting Yau, the project architect from London said "wow this is just like my Revit model, the spaces are just like what I modeled", this project is the first Revit project to be built, designed by the HOK London office.