Sandstone blocks emerge from the landscape to form an open air amphitheatre suitable for casual and formal use. The existing bridge connection from the upper floor has been reinterpreted with a portal bridge head, signage and sandstone cladding. The warm tones of timber cladding to the undercroft conceal a multitude of services and cleverly house the rubbish bin storage area out of view. Generous stairs lead users into the lower ground entry and the expanded courtyard space. Custom furniture simulate the curves of the landscape and provide a variety of seating options.

The redeveloped space has provided access and a multitude of uses for an every increasing patronage of the site.

Classroom Innovation

Science classroom design has been limited around the inflexibility of the specialised tools required for teaching. The design team unpacked the learning modes into Theory and Prac based activities and created a space that would enable students to move safely and quickly between one mode and the other. Teachers can move seamlessly around the room to help facilitate learning as well as uniquely shift the space to accommodate 30 to 60 students. This is useful for team teaching, academic mentorship and student engagement. A unique Art Museum learning space leverages the schools already significant art collection to make available for the students new ways to observe, connect and inspire cross disciplinary conversations.

Social Learning Innovation

Highly flexible classrooms wrap around a four-story high ‘incubator’ space with suspended group study ‘petri-dishes’ pods that give the space its character and reinforce the intended behaviour around creative thinking. The inclusion of this circular motif became a symbol around a collective learning community  promoting conditions around curious enquiry. The pods are a significant collaboration between structural engineers, construction sequencing, architectural design and a living example for the boys of what can be achieved with excellence in technical design innovation. Each of the pods represent different disciplines open for interconnected learning. Acoustically reflective ceilings lighten the weight as a spatial object and blur edges. Without touching the ground they also define rooms. One with an infinite whiteboard, another a stage for the construction of LEGO objects as prototypes for ideas. These apparently simple elements within the space belies the challenges of structure to enable its suspension.

Contemporary learning framework

The school was driven to create a building that enabled higher order learning. As part of that condition required recognition of the importance of mindfulness (readiness to learn) and meta cognitive process (learning to learn). The connection between the teacher-led environments (classrooms) and the student directed spaces was an important component of the design. The weight of expectation in this environment needed to move from teacher-owned space to one that enabled spatial agency for students.  Throughout the building an incredibly diverse range of study spaces has been designed to accommodate every human condition. However this is all elevated to create an interior character that excites, is stimulating, is calming, is dangerous (the petri-dish pods feel deliberately precarious), is performative, is observational etc. The interior becomes a theatre of demonstrable learning

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