St Margaret’s Girls School Sports Hub

This project is designed to encourage young women to make sport and healthy living an integral part of their daily lives. The design invites participation through its spatial interactions, its play of light, and its materiality. The main components are a retractable roof swimming pool for water polo and laps, and an indoor sports hall for basketball, netball, volleyball and other informal sports. These components are supported by an array of smaller facilities – a strength and conditioning gymnasium, a physical education centre, health and lifestyle seminar rooms, and amenities that facilitate reductions in scale around and between the larger elements. The architecture is a play between celebration of the volumes required for swimming/indoor team sports and the intimate scale that can be applied to the smaller components. The pool is framed by lightweight walls that support the retractable roof and impart a theatrical atmosphere to the space. Openings are cut out to reveal surrounding existing vegetation at particular points, such that there is a dual sense of containment and connection. The indoor sports hall is clad in translucent material that admits daylight perpetration and allows natural ventilation. One side opens up to a large plinth variously used for social games, tennis courts, and school gathering. The site has a steep topography falling down and away from the existing school campus. Our approach was to form the precinct like a ‘mesa’ into which the pool is lowered and onto which the sports hall is placed, with the filters and amenities serving the overall facility tucked under the hall. The mesa is effectively at the same level as the main campus datum enabling constant interconnection. Brickwork forms a granular consistency with the school’s materiality as well as housing around the site. The brickwork is diversely employed to form social nooks, diaphanous screen walls and seating ledges that encourage passive recreation around the sports arenas, creating domestic scale in contrast to the upper framed walls that rise to define the pool and hall. The design has been markedly successful in its endeavour to dramatically uplift participation in sport and other forms of physical activity, with correlated benefits to mental health and study. Whether at an elite or recreational level, the project has been transformative for the school, coincidentally enriching its social life and sense of belonging. The following quote from a school representative reflects their appreciation of our work: “An unexpected joy of the precinct is how it has become a physical representation of our school culture. Speaking to students, educators, and families alike, it’s an agreed representation of learning, interaction, and play in one connected precinct. How? Because the architect understood our school – what was important and how to translate that into a magical realised design. It wasn't easy, they had to dig deep, work collaboratively with contractors and the school, and find solutions to tough problems arising from the pandemic, but they met expectations and delivered much more. Today, we couldn't imagine the school without this precinct.”.