POE

Vertical Schools as Community Hubs

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

Integrated briefing for better design is underpinned by a new social consciousness, combined with sustained efforts to stop thinking and acting in silos. If cultural, built, and natural environments must be considered together, then an integrated approach to design must connect the spatial, virtual, and organisational elements to create better urban experiences and places. The rapid emergence of vertical schools – perhaps the most critical contemporary form of Australian urban infrastructure – provides an excellent opportunity to leverage the potential of integrated approaches to design. In this guest blog, Tony Matthews discusses the need for the design of vertical schools to be considered across scale, from urban to building to interior, across domains, from education to policy, and inclusive of the range of stakeholders from school to local community.

South Melbourne Primary School. Image courtesy of Hayball.

The vertical school typology is a transformative departure from traditional school design, where buildings follow a horizontal, low-rise profile and school campuses are often on large land parcels with plentiful green space. Vertical schools are usually between four and seventeen storeys. They are designed to accommodate the full range of teaching, administration, and recreational activities within one or two buildings.

Continue reading →

From Relational to Transformational: Achieving ‘value-for-money’ in school design

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

What do we mean by value? In this guest blog, Gary Adsett shares the “value-thinking” taking place at policy level in the development of independent schools across Queensland, Australia. He discusses how value-for-money is considered to maximise educational outcomes.

Caloundra Christian College. Architect: McLellan Bush.

I lead a Block Grant Authority that provides capital funds to Queensland independent schools to support their construction of new buildings and refurbishment of existing ones. The collective amount of funding distributed is significant, particularly when considered over a 10-year funding horizon. As with any investment, there is a desire to achieve a value-for-money outcome to maximise the return on investment. This funding is considered an investment toward the provision of high-quality student educational outcomes.

Continue reading →

Spotting white whales and post occupancy evaluations

/ fionay27 / 2 Comments

This year, post occupancy evaluation has become mandatory criteria as part of the New South Wales Board of Architects continuing professional development. Sue Wittenoom reflects on the scarcity of POEs and their value as a tool for learning, measuring impact, and longer-term improvement.

Image: Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

July is peak whale watching season on the east coast of Australia. Up to 40,000 humpback whales are on the move to warmer breeding grounds after a summer of feeding on krill in Antarctic waters. This year there’s already been a reported sighting of the all-white humpback whale named Migaloo – “white fella” in the language of the First Nations people of Byron Bay where he was first seen in 1991.

One white whale among tens of thousands – it’s no wonder that he makes the news.

Continue reading →

Briefing against risk (Part 2)

/ fionay27 / 1 Comment

In Part 1, Simon Foxell discussed the need to refocus our approach to projects and our professional duty to discover whether the briefing we deliver is effective and results in the intended outcomes in countering risk. Here, he addresses how we need to respond to the challenges of concurrently managing demographic change and reversing damage to the environment in a joined-up way.

Image source: David Eccles

The temptation on the part of governments faced with major challenges could well be a regulatory move to a rigid system with a limited number of solutions intended to deliver certainty. This represents the very antithesis of briefing, with its explorative and open-ended approach, configured to encourage innovation and bespoke solutions to individual problems. Voices may warn policymakers that rigid systems rarely succeed and, with a horse that has already bolted, a far more responsive approach is required; but the temptation to enact strict dirigiste measures may be overwhelming. Briefing urgently needs to develop an alternative to this that combines certainty on a range of outcomes, a relaxed approach to others; possibly including matters of zoning, style or privacy; with flexibility on how they can and should be delivered. Outcome-based briefing and specification is, of course, not new, but the imperative to make it work is that much greater.

Continue reading →

Briefing against risk (Part 1)

/ fionay27 / 1 Comment

In this two-part guest blog, Simon Foxell discusses the challenges of briefing in the context of risk and uncertainty and the need to address concurrent issues of managing demographic change and reversing environmental damage.

Image source: Birdman photos

We live in a risky and increasingly, riskier, world, or at least a world where we are much more aware of risk than ever before and tend to employ avoidance strategies of numerous sorts. That such strategies rarely address real risks and prefer to focus on perceived ones with their, now familiar – but apparently almost impossible to contain, cognitive biases shouldn’t obscure the need to factor in real future risks. Briefing is, amongst other things, a matter of effectively, and with the right tools, projecting rationally into the future, describing its needs and dangers and flagging up possible ways of dealing with them. It is a means of coping with uncertainty by gathering and interpreting information that reduces that uncertainty. It attempts to mitigate risk: to the project, but also to the wider context – social and environmental – and much else beyond.

Continue reading →