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Heritage Building Update – An Insight into Educational Architecture
Contract winning and Head Architect John Lee, Co-Director McGlashan Everist Pty Ltd Architects, answers questions relating to the importance of carefully developed architectural decisions in the education space, and how these choices will benefit the Star of the Sea College community with the soon to be completed first stage of the Masterplan, The Heritage Project.
Why is architecture so important in an educational setting? New learning environments should be flexible, to offer multiple possibilities of arrangements supported by sophisticated time management. They should be clustered, as opposed to a juxtaposition of classrooms, to allow for informal spaces, intermediate territories that induce group work and broaden the student-teacher relationship with the studentstudent relationship for more casual conversations and they should include reflective places. Dividing up the school space into a hierarchy of smaller clusters, introducing an intermediate level between the classroom and the whole school, and supporting teamteaching can achieve this. New learning environments should have a common-core, an ‘informal meeting place’ where the whole
or parts of the school can gather in various ways and groups like a ‘melting-pot’. And they should promote connectivity; the school should be part of a wider network, virtually and physically. The learning setting is intrinsically linked to student comfort and motivation as it involves fundamental characteristics such as fresh air, acoustic quality, thermal and lighting levels, as well as decorative aspects such as colour and material finishes that are integral to the occupants’ well-being and capability and will determine the student’s experience. That is why good architecture is so important. Tell us what you like most about your work in education? The opportunity to improve the lives and learning opportunities of those who are the future of our world.
