St Mary’s College New Riverside Precinct, Ipswich

The project incorporates 17 teaching spaces including Art, Science, Home economics, Hospitality, and Music, Dance, Drama.

Science spaces have curved student theory seating allowing an intimate class group format, with surrounding practical spaces. Art spaces are flexible and open to outdoor spaces. The dance space is tall and light, the music spaces varied to suit individual performance through to band groupings. Recording facilities allow students professional level opportunities. Hospitality spaces serve generous outdoor settings with connections to both the river and the Heritage precinct.

All spaces have exposed services and high ceilings with acoustic absorption promoting both good acoustic performance as well as opportunities as a learning tool about engineering.

The removal of a string of long-term demountables freed up the site’s “prime real-estate” with the river view, hitherto ignored. This long narrow sliver of site atop a precipitous slope became the new Riverside Precinct.

We restored Mercy House as the “Grand Old Lady” of the campus, whilst the new buildings skirt the formal geometry of the convent in a curvilinear embrace, echoing the undulating topography of the site, the curves of the school logo, the river and mountainous distant horizon.

The sloping site and level changes were used to their full advantage, creating varied types of external teaching and gathering spaces. Verandahs and courtyards are used to extend the teaching spaces.

The broad sweeping staircases, and oversailing pedestrian links of the new buildings tie the whole site together in terms of equitable undercover access, and also provide framed views and moments of theatre. The neutral palette of the generous western verandahs sit humbly in their Heritage context with the intention that the students bring colour and vivacity to this fluid movement corridor. Fine filaments of colour weave their way through the new buildings, alluding to the colour spectrum as an accessible commonality between the disciplines of art and science.

The radial geometry of the structural grid dictated by the curve of the new buildings results in a string of non-rectilinear spaces creating exciting and quirky trapezoidal rooms that are functional, fun and engaging.