Glaitness School – A New Nursery in Kirkwall

Glaitness is one of several nursery projects carried out for OIC over the past several years. Expansion in nursery education provision for early years requires significant growth in existing provision. This project involved internal remodelling and reallocation of provision in Glaitness primary school and a newbuilt nursery unit providing play, learning, servicing, staff and parent facilities, for in excess of 65 children.

The site in central Kirkwall is constricted and adjoins Pickaquoy road next to Kirkwall’s ‘Peedie sea’. The existing school buildings are relatively pedestrian with a prevailing beige wet dashed, lowrise series of linked buildings. Given the function of the new building, a decision was made to express the new nursery more confidently and colourfully with an expressed series of more steeply pitched roofs, white polymer render and colourful, cheerful expression of windows, expressed structural elements and further colour to gables. Massing is linear with scissored roofs, recessed gables to create sheltered exterior play spaces and boldly expressed fascias.

The building has been highly successful in use and is in successful contrast to its surroundings, being a clearly contemporary design statement which signals its function clearly.