St Raphael’s School – New and Refurbished Learning Communities

Trying to Redevelop their learning vision but limited by existing conditions, refurbishing the entire school and creating new surrounding multi-storey ‘learning boxes’, St.Raphael’s Primary School has become a spatially dynamic learning environment encouraging community, connected learning and a extensive range of differentiated learning settings.

Project Details

Architects
Law Architects

Address
Cooper Street West Preston, VIC, 3072, Australia

Submitter
Sandy Law

Cost
$ 2,542,000.00

Photographer
Peter Andrewartha

Project Overview

St. Raphael’s Primary School had embarked upon a journey of change to their learning vision prior to the commencement of the design for their new spaces. Surrounded in thick brick walls, solid doors and isolated staircases, the schools ability to interact with adjacent spaces and develop learning communities across the year levels was hindered, as well as impacting upon the cohesiveness of the school community as a whole.

The school was going through a growth phase and an undetermined future of enrolment numbers meant that the location of additional spaces needed careful consideration. Additionally the school is on a tight site with little outdoor undercover space, and precious little playgrounds. The edges of the buildings therefore needed to encourage habitats for being and learning.

Therefore in lieu of building 5 new classrooms on valuable playground, Law Architects saw the need to focus on circulation and integration of the two floors of learning, whilst not only adding much needed spaces, but refurbishing and rezoning the entire existing buildings.

It was determined that the entire school needed significant refurbishment work, despite the enormous disruption that would create during construction, to ensure an homogenous learning environment be developed. It was critical that the schools vision of learning, be able to be translated across the whole school, ensuring that no-one was “left behind”.

The resultant design responded to the robust existing two storey heritage building through the addition of timber ‘learning boxes’ on either side, with significant overhangs to act as undercover outdoor breakout space. These Award Submission Template new spaces annexed the two storey building, creating strong links vertically and horizontally, enabling a variety of new access points into and within the spaces.

What has been created is a spatially dynamic learning environment that encourages community, connected learning and provides an extensive range of differentiated settings for St. Raphael’s well into the future.

The learning yards have been activated by a much higher level of involvement by the parent/carer body who equally feel welcome and invited into the spaces to live and learn.