Project 3: A Sustainable School

Design plans and sections

General classrooms

Science and Food Technology plans

3D images

Findings about school designs

I found some interesting information about designing for schools, done by the American Architecture Foundation at the Design for Learning Forum.
Here are their ten findings:

+ Reinvent the design process to allow for greater innovation.
+ Design with flexibility in mind: give teachers and students the freedom and space for greater creativity in the learning process.
+ Respond more quickly to the ongoing paradigm change in teaching and learning.
+ Create stronger links to education reformers seeking to close the achievement gap and design with 21st century skills in mind.
+ Recognize the power of technology as well as its limits.
+ Make the design process more inclusive: recognize the voice of students and the role of citizen designers.
+ Design for the Age Wave: recognize that in this era of life-long learning, millions of retiring baby-boomers will want to use schools facilities.
+ Rebuild the connection between school and community: design the next generation of schools as community learning centers.
+ Provide school board members with a greater level of expertise and create a richer design matrix that moves school boards beyond the bottom line as the over-riding reason to choose one design over another.
+ Invest in research that links school design to student achievement including such indirect links as teacher retention, personalization, and conditions for learning.

Materials and sustainable concepts

Part of my design was to include timber slats on the outside of the buildings to shade the classrooms. The slats are to be made of recycled timber sourced from Timber Zoo (http://www.timberzoo.com.au), located on Portarlington rd, with a native climber growing on it for further shade. I chose to use the Billardiera Scandens (or common apple berry) climber, as it can grow in shade or full sun and grows in Victoria, and is especially suited to costal conditions. More information about this plant can be found at the Sustainable Gardening Australia web site below:
http://www.sgaonline.org.au/plant_billardierascandens.html














My design uses Bamboo flooring in some of the classrooms, as an environmentally sustainable alternative to timber flooring.
http://www.bamboodirect.com.au/flooring.html
In my design I also considered thermal mass, so I chose to use CSR Hebel, or autoclaved, aerated concrete (AAC), in my walls. The image below demonstrated how the Hebel attaches to the frame. It is also a lightweight and quick design alternative to traditional concrete.
www.hebelaustralia.com.au

Sustainable School

In my research on sustainable schools, I came across the Sidwell Friends School, which has a sustainable designed Middle School Green Building. The building includes ‘recycled, rapidly renewable, and locally produced materials, as well as paints, carpets and adhesives with low emission of volatile organic compounds, and even the most of the wood comes from environmentally certified sources.’ Furthermore, it has a constructed wetland for treating waste, solar panels for electricity generation, and uses passive solar design such as ventilation and shading systems.

http://www.sidwell.edu/about_sfs/greenbuilding_ms.asp

Visit the web site to take a tour of the school and see all its environmental features:
http://www.sidwell.edu/green_tour/

Re-worked master plan

During the master plan presentation our group received some feedback from the tutors, who felt we needed further consider some of the environmental aspects of our design relating to wind and water. For this reason we decided to make some alterations to the original master plan.

In the re-worked design, we moved the science classrooms towards the south-east of the site to act as a buffer from the wind coming from that direction, and also created a large water catchment area, collecting the rain water off the roofs of the surrounding buildings.

The site plan showing the classrooms and food technology and science buildings

Project 2: Master Plan

Master plan drawings

Plan showing boardwalks connecting the buildings in the school

Master Plan design

Project two involves the design of a school for students in years 10-12, next to the existing Torquay Primary School. To aid our design for the high school, our group drew on our own school experiences, and discussed the things we liked about them and changes we thought needed to be made to improve the school.

One of the key ideas in our master plan was the emphasis on student access from the south-east corner of the site, to encourage pedestrian access and thus reduce the traffic congestion at the main Grossman's road entrance. We decided to keep the council building, for sustainability reasons, and alter it to suit the rest of the school.

This was the end result:

The areas we aimed to cover in the master plan:

- Provide parking to accommodate for teaching staff, parents and visitors.
- Reduce congestion of Grossman’s road at peak drop off and pick up times by incorporating a road travelling through the school and a drive-through drop-off and pick-up point.
- Accommodate for the winter sun by having large quantities of North facing windows.
- Allow the penetration of sunlight in buildings through central courtyards and high windows to create a high level of natural lighting throughout the school.
- Aim to focus the winter sun on outdoor recreational areas.
- Eaves windows to reject the summer sunlight and emit the winter sunlight.
- Configure the design to emit the prevailing wind of summer months into main recreational areas.
- Configure the design to shelter outdoor recreational areas from the harsh prevailing winter winds.
- Utilise natural barriers, such as landscaping and land formations to redirect unwanted winds.
- Provide access to all school areas by creating a boardwalk to connect buildings
- Link the existing and new school grounds by the boardwalk to enable shared use of facilities and spaces, including courts
- Reduce reduce traffic congestion at the front entrance by creating a secondary drop-off point at the rear of the school via a boardwalk that encourages the use of public transport by providing access to the bus stop, thus creating a primarily student pedestrian entrance
- The layout of the buildings was designed to creating a sunken courtyard space in the centre of the school that can be used by the students as a place to relax, study or eat

Torquay Primary site visit 2

Our group decided to create a second entrance to the school via the path at the rear or the site, to reduce the traffic congestion at the main front entrance. This could be used as student pedestrian access or a bus/car drop-off point

CFA building and connecting road

Torquay Primary School site visit 1

The primary school has many outdoor areas for the students to play

The classrooms have lots of spaces for work to be displayed, such as on windows and hanging from the ceiling

The plan and current construction of the new 7-9 high school

Project 1: RARE Architecture

Here is our group’s RARE school design video. The animations turned out black in the imovie version below. We did make another version in windows with the animations, however this is not on you tube yet…

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GcQRfB4OPDQ

Renders and model

Images for RARE school design

The shipping container folding out...

which creates the floorplans below:

Passive heating and cooling techniques