Mundaring Christian College Parkerville Campus

The Parkerville Campus of Mundaring Christian College is a new four stream secondary school located on a beautiful heavily forested site on top of the Darling Scarp.

This first stage of the school has been built on the only cleared part of the property and its siting was informed by a bushfire risk analysis.

A masterplan for the school was developed based on an excellent education brief: a hills school with an “artisan” focus.

The stage one building houses specialist learning areas and GLA’s grouped around a central hub. Facilities in this building have been designed to encourage interaction between departments and avoid formation of knowledge “silos”.

Art studios, woodcraft and blacksmithing workshops, an ICT design lab and a large exhibition space are grouped together to facilitate collaboration.

Mundaring Christian College is a low fee school catering to families that desire a Christian education for their children. It was imperative that the new school delivered excellent value whilst ensuring low maintenance costs into the future.

The school has been constructed using loadbearing precast concrete panels with a sandblasted integral colour finish. The LVL roof beams are supported directly off the concrete panels and internal partition walls are stud framed. In this way; the structural system is also the enclosure and the finish for the building.

This has delivered a high quality building with low maintenance at a cost of $2,000/m2 GFA. This is excellent value considering that the stage one building contains the costly specialist learning areas for the completed College: future buildings will be more economical as they will be lightly serviced GLA’s.

The building has been designed with future adaptability in mind as some facilities (e.g. administration) will relocate into future buildings.

The long axis of the building runs north / south along a contour in order to minimise excavation into rock and ensure disabled access on one level throughout. This “incorrect” orientation for solar design has been studied in detail to ensure that there is adequate sunshading to openings. Extensive glazing to the north and south facades ensure the central space is daylit, colouful and inviting.