LOCATION
Brighton, Victoria

CLIENT
St James Catholic Primary School

SECTOR
Education

PHOTOGRAPHY
Peter Clarke

TRADITIONAL LAND OWNERS
The Bunurong People

AWARDS
Winner ~ Learning Environments Australasia Awards, Victorian Chapter


The St James Catholic Primary School modernisation project was ambitious. We renovated 50% of the school while it was still operating. A necessary modernisation as the existing learning areas significantly deteriorated.

At the heart of this transformation is the reinterpretation of existing building stock, into bright modern teaching and learning facilities. The existing facilities were enclosed, and opaque in a traditional classroom format. The school wanted facilities that had lots of transparency and connectedness with breakout opportunities.

The school footprint is tightly constrained and located over two adjacent sites split by a public laneway. Our idea was to connect them together via an internal air bridge over the lane, dubbed the 'Sky Bridge'. Crucially, the bridge allowed the students to travel safely between the two parts of the school and create additional breakout spaces.

The School in the Sky became a part of the identity of the project and subsequently the school. The teaching and learning spatial reconfiguration brought large amounts of transparency, connectedness and opportunity to the students and staff through multi-use spaces and micro breakouts. These breakout spaces encourage an extension of the classroom for individual or group work in an array of configurations comprising built-in joinery and furniture.

A major success of this project is that the interior reconfiguration has transformed and significantly modernised this school. By avoiding demolition, it focuses on enhancing existing facilities whilst setting the school up to last well into the future. This reuse is a significant sustainable outcome because it demonstrates that clever and creative interior design can rescue dilapidated facilities and allow them to become a benchmark for educational interior design. The selection of materials and furniture elements were carefully curated to allow for a meaningful educational experience and to encourage connectivity across the spaces.

Breaking through the barriers and constraints of the public laneway, by designing up and over was an innovative way of solving an unusual situation. It allowed for the school to be activated in a way that it hadn't before; becoming a conversation within the community with its new identity. Designing micro breakouts that differed in size, location and shape enabled students and teachers to work individually, in groups or be an extension of the classroom. This still allowed for transparency and connectivity between spaces whilst allowing students to work in different environments.