QUEENSLAND SHORTLIST
EDUCATIONAL ARCHITECTURE
Category
Introducing the Shortlist for EDUCATIONAL ARCHITECTURE
The following projects have been shortlisted for the 2022 Queensland Architectural Awards, in the Educational Category. This page will continue to list shortlisted project until the last of the 2022 Queensland Regional Events have concluded in Townsville on the 10th of June 2022. The result of the 2022 Queensland Architecture awards will be revealed via livestream, which will be shown at the presentation event on the 24th of June 2022 at the State Library of Queensland, and also available via Youtube.
St Thomas Aquinas Centre
The St Thomas Aquinas Centre provides an assured urban presence, renewed circulation and opportunities for collaboration at Aquinas College, the Gold Coast’s oldest co-education school.
Assembling its leadership, curriculum leaders and teaching staff in a central, flexible space, the new administration building delivers layered entry and exit experiences for students, staff and their communities.
Working within the footprint of previous facilities, the Centre amplifies key lines of circulation and patterns of occupation – creating a welcoming and thoughtfully-landscaped address to the street.
Deicke Richards was responsible for Aquinas’ current master plan, which identifies future projects including science and student facilities, a chapel, performing arts building and multipurpose space. The St Thomas Aquinas Centre comprises its first completed stage.
By Deicke Richards
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones
Citation:
Designed with the overt principle of engagement initiatives in mind, the project is conceived to be climatically and socially reactive to the locale. The planning responds to both the notions of pedagogy and place, and endeavours to engage with a carefully considered flow from interior to exterior spaces. The centre reflects on its significance by adopting the predominate use of local face brickwork in clean contemporary lines, to produce a harmonious balance with the existing built elements.
USC Foundation Building, Moreton Bay Campus
The first building on USC’s new Moreton Bay Campus is a ‘next-gen’ smart campus that’s super flexible for planned growth. Hassell designed the three-story Foundation Building to be built fast to meet demand, accommodating around 1500 students immediately and up to 5000 in the first three years, including science, engineering, allied health, education, law, and business students. A two-storey amphitheatre centralises activity at the heart of the building – supported by adjacent nodes of student and IT services and a 24-hour library. In tune with the broader campus, the Foundation Building encourages use by the community with lecture theatre and large format learning spaces zoned for after-hours events. The building’s deep over-hanging roofs and extensive sun-shading optimise solar performance for a sub-tropical climate.
By Hassell
Photography by Tom Ross
Citation:
As the first building in a new campus charged with delivering a wide ranging and, at the time, undefined teaching programme, Foundation House facilitates a seismic shift in higher education attendance at a regional level. Through rigorous planning the architects have crafted a building that nimbly balances competing needs with an efficient plan and sectional diagram. Clear circulation and orientation navigates teaching spaces interspersed with intimate personal learning nooks, communal shared spaces and staff accommodation in a democratic planning regime around a public amphitheatre, the building’s metaphorical heart. This campus within a building energetically evolves the language and functionality of tertiary education environments, inverting the classic external courtyard typology, benchmarking resilience and adaptability to situate the building firmly in the future city.
Andrew N. Liveris Building
This flagship project for UQ incorporates a range of interconnected spaces with overlapping boundaries between learning, research and industry via a design encouraging a sense of shared discovery and collaboration. The building positions UQ into the future while also playing homage to its past, with a unique energy-efficient glass facade clad in a distinctive transparent veil derived conceptually from the chemical engineering process of turning sandstone into glass – with colours sampled directly from the nearby Great Court. Its compact vertical urban form provides informal learning spaces for students and staff, reclaiming half of the site for landscape spaces. These landscapes are connected to formal and informal student learning spaces visible from the campus via open interconnected ‘pod’ balconies. A central atrium space, derived from the form of the Great Court, links together the learning/research activities of the School of Chemical Engineering into a singular and highly connected collaborative environment.
By Lyons + m3architecture
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones and Lyons
Citation:
This design is an intelligent response to the brief, focussed on maintaining the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland as an international leader in chemical engineering education and research. Drawing inspiration from its surroundings and guiding principles of connectedness and openness this rational holistic design response respectfully embraces the importance of students, urban form, landscapes, colours and the materials of the campus and transposes them all into a future focussed architecture. Through rigorous design, technical explorations and careful interpretation of the client’s pedagogical brief, Lyon and m3architecture provide a design, which truly enlivens the spirit of both students and teaching staff. This is an excellent example of a well-considered learning environment, which will further advance the performance of engineering research and learning at the University.
The Marian Centre, Brigidine College
The Marian Centre is a Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics building designed to encapsulate the College’s vision ‘to stimulate learning… for our young women to make a difference in the world.’ The College’s wider ethos is ‘strength and gentleness’.
The design endeavours to embody the vision and ethos through its plan, section, form, materiality and spatial configurations. Key to the plan is a naturally ventilated spine and contiguous indoor and outdoor auditoria, the latter engaging the school’s main open space.
Sustainability and authenticity are further College precepts. Almost the entire building is naturally ventilated through both cross and longitudinal air flows, with solar photovoltaics supplying conditioning when needed.
Classrooms and laboratories vary in format to stimulate participation, with those at the western end organically configured, and both ends protected by diaphanous operable ribbed screens, characterising the street and park interfaces.
STEM engagement has dramatically increased in the College.
By Blight Rayner
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones
Citation:
The new Marian Centre is a robust and elegant STEM building, conceived to inspire young women in their future career pursuits in the science, technology and mathematics fields. The ascending central spine is a naturally ventilated, open-ended “street” which feeds into the varied modes of learning spaces and also serves as a versatile social and learning corridor across all of the levels. The building opens generously up to the school’s main green space, whilst carefully curating the engagement to the street and wider suburb. The masterful consideration and coordination of services results in a well-crafted and understated, fit-for-purpose facility that simultaneously conveys confidence and humility.
Brisbane South State Secondary College
Brisbane South State Secondary College, the city’s newest vertical campus, offers next level learning connected with the contemporary knowledge network and the country it is bound to – a ridge historically used for camping, weaving and the making of tools by the local First Nations.
Visitors are welcomed within a generous arrival court into a memorable and vibrant central native garden, a magnet for community into the campus. Open galleries across all levels fringe the garden, encouraging interactions and framing views to the surrounding landscape.
Multi-discipline learning hubs are characterised by open and adaptable spaces arranged around double height presentation and making settings in order to share the benefits of education with all.
The architectural language is derived from the First Nations heritage of the site as a place of making, informing the scored details within the concrete facade, as well as harnessing a local palette of colours and materials.
By BVN
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones
Citation:
The College is a masterly work of Architecture at all scales, elevating what is essentially a real estate problem of small inner-city sites with large student catchments into a heralding of the education and experiential potential of ‘vertical’ schools in humid sub-tropical climates. The client’s ambitious pedagogic agenda for the College has been realised through a thorough, architect led ‘in project’ research and development of bespoke programmatic and spatial arrangements across the campus. Negotiating a fragmented procurement process, the architects have demonstrated aplomb through development of a resilient, refined, technically astute & refreshingly unfussy material approach, delivering an original spatial, tectonic and landscape language through deep readings of place and country.
