Friends’ School Lisburn | 1774 Pavilion

The resultant pavilion, delivered on time to a tight budget and timeframe, is an undulating, sculptural canopy in Corten steel, with iroko-clad supports. The team collaborated with the school and its pupils, conducting initial workshops with music and arts students to engage their imaginations and understand their preferences. A competition and factory site visit was also arranged for technology students during the manufacturing stage. Pupils were invited to design a perforation for the canopy backdrop, with the winning design featuring in the finished structure. The pavilion design draws inspiration from the school’s Quaker heritage; deconstructing the 8-pointed Quaker star into its constituent parts and tessellating them back together to form the distinctive roof profile. Corten steel provides a weatherproof, zero-maintenance finish with its characteristic rusty appearance that can be enjoyed from all angles, including from above, overlooked from adjacent school buildings. Iroko-clad angular steel posts rise from six base points within a concrete stage, and fold together to support the roof structure. A deceptively simple and understated rainwater strategy was developed with the contractor and manufacturer, Fabrite, and structural engineers, Eamson, in which the crisp 10mm edges of the canopy are preserved, and water is directed along its valleys, in a zigzag formation, towards the rear of the structure, where a small fold in the Corten allows it to fall discreetly into drains within surrounding planting. The backdrop to the rear of the pavilion is animated by 250 star-shaped perforations in the Corten, which twinkle and glow across the back of the stage, depending on the light and time of day. Their seemingly random arrangement depicts the constellations of stars visible in the sky above Lisburn on 6th September 2024, the anniversary launch.