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

Prefabricated housing

The following are prefabricated housing ideas. The construction techniques could potentially be related to the school design to allow for easily transportation and erection:

Modular sustainable housing is a type of prefab and adaptable house
http://modscape.com.au/













The houses have minimal environmental impact and can achieve a six star rating
http://prefabhouse.com.au/Quon.html




















The Future shack is intended as a temporary structure, for remote locations, and uses recycled shipping containers as the main shell. They are easily dismantled, shipped and reassembled.

The shipping container element of this structure follows the idea of recycling containers that our group is already exploring.
http://seangodsell.com/

Design Inspiration

Ideas of how a shipping container can be folded out and transformed into new spaces

Or ways to use multiple containers to create spaces