School as Community, Community as School: Design Intergration (BAE Capstone)

School as Community, Community as School: Design Intergration (Capstone)

BAEN3002 Semester 2 2019

Somwrita Sarkar

This is the urban age, the age of cities. The United Nations predicts that by 2050, 68% of the projected 9 billion people on the planet will be living in cities. Our cities are evolving to accommodate increasing physical, functional, and socio-economic diversities. A school is not simply a school, an office is not simply an office, a house is not simply a house. Instead, buildings, spaces, and precincts become multifaceted spaces supporting a range of complex, compounded urban spatial and locational activities and processes.

The studio focussed on the design of a primary school for the suburb of Westmead, situated next to the Central River City of Parramatta, proposed by the Greater Sydney Commission as the second Central Business District for growing metropolitan Sydney. The students successfully responded to a unique set of challenges in their design responses, arising from the local context, but universally relevant for the Sydney metropolitan region, exploring the hierarchical relationships between architecture, urban design, and urban planning.

See the architects’ website: http://www.lacatonvassal. com/?idp=56