View more
Nathan Etherington
The brief of Rescaling the School, Architecture Design Studio 5, is a small primary school in Green Square. As Sydney’s periphery continues to expand to its geographical limits, scalar relationships and patterns of urbanisation are continually reconfigured. This process of urban rescaling encompasses changing relationships between commercial centres, residential suburbs, industry and transport. Within these rescaling processes, the suburban school is a key site of social as well as educational infrastructure. Schools are integral in the formation of communities in newly planned suburbs at the outer fringes as well as dense post-industrial developments, each entailing specific design and planning strategies for the given site.
As a site of experimentation, the school provides numerous opportunities for architects. Schools are increasingly moving towards modular designs, and there is great potential for non-traditional modular and pre-fabricated construction methodologies to be applied and tested in the design of school buildings. This studio focuses heavily on researching and applying these systems. In the integration of buildings and landscape, the school is an ideal building type to progress the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, with the integration of multiple landscape types within a site plan. Finally, as a platform for testing sustainable design principles, the school provides many possibilities for the exploration of passive systems and low-carbon construction methodologies, considering embodied energy of construction materials, passive design, water sensitive design and social sustainability.
