Mt Maria College, St Benedict Building

“We were looking for a purpose built facility to cater for the learning needs of our Middle School students. These students needed learning spaces which are flexible, visually appealing and robust.”

The St Benedict Building provides an agile built response that respects heritage and celebrates the special character of Mt Maria College. Within a modest budget, it provides eight general learning spaces and eight specialist spaces that encourage community and are a joy to use. The design philosophy was to design the building structure and shell, then approach the classroom fitouts like a tenancy. Services were designed to be accessible and easily reconfigured. Design technology and science spaces are co-located to deliver the STEM curriculum and the building has been designed to facilitate collaborative learning across all subject areas. The building itself is a learning tool with services and structure exposed and signed. Extensive stakeholder consultation ensured that they felt listened to and their needs were met.

“I love teaching in the new building. It’s spacious, airy and the fact we can move the furniture around to suit the learning needs is a real bonus.”

“I think the St Benedict building achieves not only high performance capability for the current learning and teaching community but should be as capable of the same into a future of many, many as yet unknown, ‘tenancies.’”