Greenock’s Notre Dame High School, with its giant colonnade and stepped entrance, is a genuinely civic building.
Unlike the majority of contemporary schools isolated from their communities within a landscape of car parking, Notre Dame is embedded within the fabric of its town. The school’s proximity to the public realm of road and pavement recalls Glasgow’s traditional parish schools, conceived and constructed as an extension of the urban tissue.
As the demolition of much Brutalist architecture has demonstrated, permanence does not reside within a building’s material durability, but with the appropriation of a building by its users. As such Notre Dame’s final assessment will be given by the generations of school children who pass through its colonnade. So, while Archial has delivered a fine addition to Greenock’s urban realm, not only is the jury out – the jurors have yet to be born.