Wurun Senior Campus

A new, vertical high school in a dense urban context. The building brings together senior students from two existing schools to provide students with an environment that supports contemporary learning, sustainability, and health and wellbeing. The six-storey building is highly integrated within the local community and maximises the constraints of the narrow site. In addition to its progressive learning approach, it is designed to be fully integrated with the adjacent vertical sports centre. Folding around a prominent corner site, the building form steps up along its length to create a series of landscaped outdoor terraces. Each terrace connects directly to interior learning environments to create external teaching and learning, break out, recreation, and social spaces that reinforce connections to nature, health, and wellbeing. The high school design is defined by a tertiary-style education experience – a series of diverse, flexible and technology rich spaces which promote self-directed and project-based learning. This was the key strategy for supporting the schools’ ambition to help students build the ‘21st Century skills’ needed to be adaptable, innovative, and ready to navigate their future beyond high school. Each level is designed as a learning precinct and features a range of learning environments of varying types and scales to support personalised and collaborative learning. Rather than a single atrium model, the vertical movement through the building uses a series of smaller, connected, and overlapped voids. This approach creates a journey through the school and, importantly, exposes students to different disciplines and learning spaces. The wide stair width and spatial dynamic provides an experiential approach to circulation and vertical movement, encouraging active movement and enabling informal meeting spaces. The vertical circulation route also uses colour to enable clear wayfinding and legibility. Intrinsic to the interior experience of the school is the building’s performative façade which provides for optimal energy efficiency, shading, views, glare, and natural light. The resulting variance in colour, size and angle of the horizontal and vertical blades also serves to breakdown the building’s form as it stretches along two major streets. An innovative vertical-stack design allows the campus to accommodate three multi-purpose sports courts on top of each other, with the ground-level sports facility designed to be accessible by the community out of school hours. In addition, the school is future proofed to integrate with the adjacent future multi-level sports centre and become a larger community sports facility out of school hours. Wurun Senior Campus also provides a rare example of interpretive storytelling about contested and difficult histories in a public space that is not a museum, but a school. Consultation with the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation began early in the design process and inspired an embedded narrative, collectively developed, and expressed throughout the building. As well as interpretive installations co-developed with Wurundjeri Elders and artist Ash Firebrace, the material palette draws inspiration from the Manna Gum – the tree species from which the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung take their name, and representative of connection to Country.