Loreto Community School

Milford tucks into a steep valley in north Donegal, and Grafton Architects turned the slope into the plan. The new school steps down the hillside in four linked parts — a single-storey technology wing, a two-storey classroom block, a central dining and assembly hall, and a sports hall — arranged like a pinwheel around sheltered outdoor courts, so the building reads less as one block than as a small settlement. Its roof is the clearest response to the site: a folded zinc standing-seam skin that rises and falls with the ground rather than sitting level above it. The Department of Education and Science commissioned the €11 million building to replace a 1970s boarding school for the Loreto Sisters, and the brief required construction in three phases so the existing school could stay open throughout; Phase 1 alone ran fifty-two weeks. The new building opened for some seven hundred pupils in September 2006 and won the RIAI Opus award for architecture and construction.