The new McCauley Place Learning Precinct at Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney is a striking and dramatic building. Its strong modernist forms mark a point of departure and a new focus for the school’s learning activities.
The building which houses 18 new ‘classrooms’ and a range of varied and interesting learning environments is a realisation of a modern inclusive educational approach based on open-ness and co-operation between teacher and student.
The new Learning Centre is one of the first built expressions of a strong mainstream movement to change the pedagogical paradigm of Australian secondary schools. The building has attracted interest and praise in the educational community. It is being used as a model for new teaching environments.
Relationship of the built form to its context
The campus is a dense community of buildings arranged about a series of intimate courtyards forming central focal points and meeting areas. The site for the Learning Centre was created from the rear yards of neighbouring cottages purchased by the school, it was defined by the cottages, a rear laneway and some existing classrooms which turned away from what was the rear boundary.
Program Resolution
The brief called for open-ness, transparency and connection: the new building delivers these outcomes with its transparent and moveable walls and the bridge connections between rooms.
The brief called for a new building that relied on, and therefore encouraged respect between student and teacher; the building achieves this by removing the teachers from the role of supervisor and providing a range of learning spaces for group and individual work emphasising self-motivated and self-structured learning. These include the large open breakout areas on the bridges between classrooms and the smaller study pods which give a strong expression to the building’s eastern face.
client
Monte ant’ Angelo Mercy College
size
2,130m2
cost
$8.1
completed
2007
team
Project Director
Project Architect
Architect
Ian Brewster
Andrew Hjorth
Maria Collela and Luigi Staiano
Date
2007
