Syndal South Primary School / WHDA

closed

Entry to the school is organised in a pinwheel configuration, with wayfinding as a priority. New families and visitors needed to be able to navigate intuitively at the entry point - to reception, to the library, to the central sports courtyard, to the meeting rooms. Views are choreographed; the Library is connected to the administrative areas and reception through the thoroughfare, and the clerestory window to the commons draws the eye up to the mature ring of trees bordering Montgomery Avenue.The Commons is the heart of the new building and is treated as the collective 'street' of the junior learning base, large enough for assemblies to take place in bad weather and shaped to allow small group collaboration. The entry doors to each classroom are treated as a front 'porch' with cupboards for bags, nook seating for focused reading, and pinboards to showcase student work.The building straddles domestic and civic scales and re-interprets cornerstones from the home and the neighbourhood into an education typology, such that public facing areas are scaled generously for social gathering, while learning and working areas are porous and scaled intimately for focus. Bookending the entry forecourt, the school-funded Library pavilion greets visitors as a local 'Living Room' and is flexible for both its roles as a quiet reading space during school hours and an open community hub after, with dual frontage providing views towards the school entry and internally across the sports courtyard.The junior classrooms are conceived as a mixed model between open-plan and traditional directional classroom teaching, with dedicated teaching spaces connected to the commons and direct access to outdoor learning and play. These outdoor learning areas featuring play equipment and mud kitchens serve as an extension of the classroom and informal 'territory' between younger and older students, mediated by a new yarning circle installed by the school. The classrooms are adaptive to allow for a multitude of configurations to support a range of teaching modes, independent study, or group discussion, with interactive TVs supplementing physical media for art, math games, and literacy skills.Text description provided by the architects.Syndal South Primary School is an educational hub in the leafy urban area ofMount Waverleyon the lands of the Woi Wurrung Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the new Block A building of Syndal Primary School replaces an aging asbestos laden LTC building with new Administrative offices, Junior Classrooms, and a publicly accessible Library. The design proposal aims to contextualise the proposed Block A in its suburban setting by incorporating familiar domestic archetypes of the front porch and the verandah into circulation spaces and thresholds. The majority of the spaces are consolidated under a single roof which pitches north and south in deference to the neighbourhood street and to avoid overshadowing existing hardcourt play areas.