REMOULDING LIFE

ReMoulding Life

pia ednie-brown priscilla agliadi tarryn boden maja busatlija melissa sydney sara mccunnie john dardaganis bo david chu dayne trower carolyn wong peter knights vanessa gugliotti kenneth nguyen

This studio worked on the design of a 20 year masterplan for Wales Street Primary School, a public school in Thornbury that is currently in a process of palpable change. A new principal has been appointed, and a parent summit has demonstrated desires for a ‘greener’ school, a more engaging environment, greater resources to be given to the arts, and broader community involvement.

Students were required to ‘remould’ the school grounds in ways that addressed the above desires, offering a compositional schema that could accommodate changes over time and hold together an evolving sense of the School’s identity. Students were asked to explore field-based compositions, as discussed by Stan Allen in ‘From Object to Field’ as an approach to complexity involving “working with and not against the site”, where “something new is produced by registering the complexity of the given.”

We assumed that public education would continue to move toward the Reggio Emilia project based learning approach, in which the built environment is understood as a ‘teacher’. This grounded projects in an educational philosophy that incorporates an environmental philosophy, and has significant affinity with ‘field conditions’ as discussed by Allen.

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Students designed and produced a pack of drawing and seed sprouting activities that was distributed to all of the 425 children in the school as part of a process of engaging with the school community. A blog for this activity is operating at this address: http://liveness.org/cultivating-life

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Tarryn Boden

PATCHWORK

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Patchwork sought to introduce third parties and community initiatives onto the site by including a lunch order business as a permanent fixture on site. The business would deliver locally grown produce to schools within the area. Existing site levels would be reworked to appropriately collect and redirect water and to make

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the site more self sufficient. The way the results of these decisions would be interpreted would be through that of a child. This formed a patchwork through change of appropriate materials with ground surfaces wrapping up to elevation. Open ended objects that the children would interpret as being playful were also included.

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MARKING THE GROUND

Strategy for the Wales Street Primary School is preparing the ground for future growth and learning. The manipulation of the ground is to construct the site for new infrastructure to be accommodated, in the form a library, and to organise and define the existing buildings on site as separate teaching ecologies.

Dayne Trower

The existing precedent on site of marking the ground is for play activity, such as basketball etc. Boundaries exist for learning and event through the marking of the ground surface.

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Bo David Chu

SCHOOLINKS

Based on the idea of Reggio Amelia approach, children at school often study in an open and shared environment and are involved in a number of arts and creative activities. In order to achieve this idea,

the master plan for wales street primary school is remixing and re-purposing the existing school buildings and to construct links between them to create interacting and shared spaces.

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GROWING ATMOSPHERES

Growing Atmospheres explores the notion of creating inspiring spaces which could carry lessons of environmental awareness and conservation through a state of immersion. The new schoolbuildings would become shelters, some supported by columns, like treehouses perched amongst the branches. Climbing plants would

John Dardaganis

intertwine and weave their way around the columns and over the buildings, creating an atmosphere of a living, breathing school- a delicate organism to be nurtured and be nurtured by. Thus the project seeks out the interplay of the built and the grown, the defined and the implied, the recurring and the ephemeral.

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Carolyn Wong

BLUR

Blur explores the idea of merging nature and structure. Through expermiental

there is more exposure to the outdoors. The playful landscape formed is one

drawings based on patterns, new densities are created around the exisiting

of learn and play. Patterns, wrickpers and platforms are used to form a blur of

buildings based on the concept of -Nature embraces structure and structure

some kind; one that is literal, intangible, or sone trasnlated from the concept

embraces nature-. It is at this point where the two blur. In the new created

drawings.

environment (formed from a somewhat random translations of he drawings) the little inhabitants are submerged in a magical nature realm. Suddenly,

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Vanessa Gugliotti

LIVING FENCE

SCHOOL OUTSIDE SCHOOL HOURS

SCHOOL DURING SCHOOL HOURS

This project uses a double fence as a device which, allows different programs to operate around the perimeter of thr school grounds. These programs include a playground, cafe, seedling shop and greenhouse, and other lush greenery.

The fence then draws people into the school yard at the north of the site, where the fence can be opened and closed in sections to allow private space to become public at certain times of the day.

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Priscilla Agliardi

TRANSITION

“School� is the place where many TRANSITIONS take place.

My idea is transforming the concept of TRANSITION as the driver of the changes I suggest for Wales st.

In particular, the new buildings and outdoor spaces are going to embody the principle of providing interactive

moments among what is already on the site. As a result, the experience of Wales st school itself is activeted.

Thanks to Oservation, Research and Matchboxes I have achieved a design solution that creates a playfull and childfriendly environment through simple shape and strategies i.e. juxtaposition of colors, cromatic overlap,etc.

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Sara McCunnie

SOFTSPACES

fabric sample

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gusset

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gusset - raw side

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35m2

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summer house A:

gather, hem, pleat, gusset,dart

dart-raw side

This project has looked at providing a series of expansions to traditional school spaces which offer an augmented curriculum and an alternative quality of environment.

Softness describes both the programmatic informality of a space and the qualitative experience of its materiality and spatiality.

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Kenneth Nguyen

UNFOLDING PLAY

Recenetly there has been a focus on how the natural environment affords

project explores the strategies that enable organistational complex froms to

possibilities and challanges for children to explore their own abilities for

emerge through the produciton of treatments artificially generated by a medi-

play, investigation and learning. The proposal looks to constitute itself as an

ated integration of rigourous site conditions and use, given rise to new forms

altenative to rational geometry and form to reproduce qualities of nature. This

of interaction and generative play spaces.

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