VSBA 2023 NEW SCHOOL BUNDLE
Traditional Owners and Ongoing Custodians - Wathaurung and Wurundjeri Country
Location – Tarneit, Manor Lakes, Werribee, Thorhill Park
Client – Victorian School Building Authority (VSBA)
Architects – ARM Architecture
Bush Projects worked with lead consultants ARM Architecture to design six new primary schools for the Victorian School Building Authority, all located in Melbourne’s Western urban growth boundary. The schools include Karwan Primary School, Lollypop Creek Primary School, Nearnung Primary School, Ngarri Primary School, Thornhill Park Primary School, and a new campus for Warringa Park School, an established specialist school.
Located in outer Western Melbourne within the rapidly expanding Urban Growth Boundary, this project involved the expediated design and delivery of five new public school campuses across vast greenfield sites. In collaboration with lead consultants, ARM Architecture, Bush Projects has contributed to the development of an integrated landscape solution across each of the six school campuses, complementing the standardised built components including:
Administration/learning resource centres with library, reception, staff room and offices
Community hub with indoor basketball/netball court, canteen and music rooms
Learning neighbourhoods, some with specialist learning rooms
Relocatable classrooms
The key landscape components of each school include a permeable street front interface and welcome landscape featuring grasslands meadows, a central north-south learning street that connects each of the built elements, a school heart and main gathering space, as well as outdoor learning areas, junior active, sensory and nature play areas, a senior active outdoor play space incorporating a gym circuit and a kitchen garden.
The key challenges of this project included mitigation of the vast scale and exposed conditions of each site, requiring a design response that integrated environmental amenity, including cooling the environment through strategic planting, providing shelter from strong prevailing winds and introducing an extensive tree canopy layer.
Working collaboratively with ARM Architecture, the school master plans integrated a graphic overlay of a tile tessellation, adapted as a planning guide and framework to establish landscape spatial zoning and programs across the different, variable campus sites. This process expediated the design process, defining a cohesive organisation of each school’s outdoor spaces, defining the zoning of hardscape and soft-scape ensuring consistent integration of wayfinding, articulated by a colour thematic and linework, with each campus having its own variation on the same approach. This established a fine grain of scale within a vast site area, while maintaining sightlines and ease of circulation, while integrating diverse opportunities for play and informal social gathering.
Appropriate tree placement to create a cooling tree canopy was a key challenge across these large sites. To aid this process, Bush Projects overlaid each site with a standard tree planting grid and then selectively removed trees from the grid to facilitate the tailored landscape plans for each site, thereby ensuring a cohesive and equitable density of tree planting for each school.
