Claremont College Stage 4

Since 2012 TERROIR, SASC & Claremont College have been working together to revitalize old building stock on Claremont ‘s tightly constrained urban campus. Every building on the site is typically made up of two or three ages of building, in the most extreme case buildings are over 100 years old. This presents unique challenges in creating new active, engaging,vibrant and safe learning environments. Each building is analyzed with a co-teaching, flexible open plan and technology driven pedagogy.

The 2 storey Judge Street building, or stage 4 of the masterplan implementation, consists of two buildings constructed in the 1960s and extended in the early 2000s. Claremont College and SASC defined at the conception of the masterplan the key drivers for the refurbishment of all existing buildings on the site. This allowed a strategy to develop on all building projects whereby all of the disparate parts of the school could be formed into a coherent campus , which in turn creates a support structure for the enactment of the school ‘s key values; learn, life, light, love.

The existing planning was firmly based on the cellular classroom model with inefficient use of circulation and storage spaces. In analysing the existing floor plates two key factors were immediately apparent, the ground floor had 36sqm of circulation space or 20% of potential floor space unusable as teaching space. The upper floor had 10sqm of storage rooms and an external balcony of 83sqm that could only be used as a teaching space in fair weather. Combined these two floors of the existing buildings had 20% of unusable teaching space. With this information at hand and a collaborative discussion with Cantilever Engineers we were able to establish a floor plate that regained these unusable spaces for teaching simply through opening up the ground floor and enclosing the balcony of the upper floor.

The completion of the new spaces now means that all the K-6 groups have spaces that can function as open plan learning spaces with multiple teachers and classes working together collaboratively. This is a significant milestone for the school as it embarks on its journey towards co-teaching, open plan learning spaces that are driven by collaboration, inquiry and digital technologies.