Sydney Road Community School

Sydney Road Community School (SRCS) is a small, progressive, government secondary school that values individuals and celebrates diversity. We worked with SRCS and the VSBA to relocate the school to a new leased site in Brunswick – a church hall built in 1920s.

 

The client’s brief was to create a school that didn’t feel institutional. The intervention in the existing building needed to anticipate future decommissioning.

 

The new school was designed around a central hall, where staff and students could congregate. The design didn’t segregate spaces between staff and students. We built seven micro classrooms around a central hall and entry foyer. We added a three-storey modular building at the rear of the site for specialist teaching spaces – music, science and art. The spaces were tailored to specific programs such as the junk band room, where students build and play their own instruments.

 

A landscaped central courtyard built around an established gum tree, separates the hall from the new MOD building providing a green ‘heart’ to the new school campus. We retained the integrity of the original structure with a lightweight intervention. The boundaries between the school and it’s neighbouring Sydney Road community were left intentionally porous.