2023 A4LE Project Awards Winner – Special Commendation 🌟 Hayball Architecture

Congratulations to Hayball Architecture
Winner - Special Commendation Category - 2023 A4LE Awards

🏆 Congratulations to Hayball Architects! 🏆

We are thrilled to announce that Hayball Architects has won the Special Commendation Category at the Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) Project Awards during the LearningSCAPES conference in Chicago, America. 🌟

🏫Their outstanding work on the Domremy College, Nano Nagle Learning Centre in Sydney has been recognised for its remarkable impact on the learning environment and its alignment with the highest standards of the A4LE criteria. 📚

💡The Nano Nagle Learning Centre project is more than just a building; it's a testament to the power of thoughtful planning, extensive research, and collaboration. This innovative space, which includes a school library and senior center with a shared Learning Hub, serves as the beating heart of Domremy College, bringing students and staff together in a transformative way. 🌍

🏗️From the Solais Sandpit prototype to the completion of the Nano Nagle Learning Centre, Hayball Architects has demonstrated how a design process involving research, co-design, post-occupancy evaluation, prototyping, and piloting can shape the future of education spaces.📊

🎉We applaud their dedication to creating exceptional learning environments and congratulate them once again on this remarkable achievement. 👏 Your work inspires us all to think beyond the ordinary and embrace innovation in education. 🌟

Click here to view Hayball Architects Awards Submission

Click here to view the A4LE Awards Website

About Domremy College

Domremy Catholic College is a Catholic systemic Girls College located in Sydney, Australia. The school has a long and rich history in education, originating from the South Presentation order, founded by Nano Nagle in Ireland in 1775. With the mission to provide education to the poor and needy around the world, the Presentation sisters established the school with 12 students in 1911 and over the past 112 years, enrolments have grown to 759.

In 2016, the school embarked on a master planning process to explore the opportunity to develop new facilities to accommodate ongoing growth and to enable a wider pedagogical repertoire to better support students to prepare for a rapidly evolving world. The vision was to upgrade the campus to deliver modern, new, and dynamic facilities and resources for students and teaching staff, and to enhance the student learning experience as they enter their next 21stcentury tertiary education and working phases.

At the time, as their buildings solely comprised traditional classrooms, the original Principal astutely recognised that successfully inhabiting vastly different learning spaces in the future would require equipping and empowering staff in a process of pedagogical change. The master planning process identified an opportunity for the school to refurbish an existing traditional classroom block into a prototype learning space, the Solais Sandpit.

Through using the Sandpit, school personnel were able to experience new ways to teach and learn, helping to inform the design of a subsequent new building, the Nano Nagle Learning Centre. The Domremy College story from the Solais Sandpit to the Nano Nagle Learning Centre is no ordinary building project. It is a story of how a design process involving research, co-design with users, prototyping and piloting has upskilled a school community with the knowledge to participate in conversations bridging pedagogy and space, and importantly, built staff capability to be able to collectively inhabit the vision which they co-created.