St Andrew’s School: Tarrkarri

Swanbury Penglase was engaged in 2019 to develop a major stage of the St Andrew’s School Masterplan – the establishment of a new front of School / entry building, new classrooms and a highly transparent and functional double storey workshop ‘Collaboratory” for senior years.

The Collaboratory faces onto the School’s new reception area and includes physical and visual connections to adjacent learning and teaching spaces. The workshop was developed after a Visioning Workshop and subsequent consultation with the School’s teaching staff – the intent to develop a space that could be ‘re-purposed’ and ‘reshaped’ to suit the changing needs of student groups.

The primary focus of the project become that of a large variegated educational space with multiple affordances to support a wide range of explorations in scientific and engineering areas and concurrent different activities by different group sizes. The workshop spaces enable students to set up projects and return to them on an ongoing basis over days or weeks.

The vision called for the space to be highly visible and transparent, with height, light and revealed structure to make the ‘embodied engineering’ apparent.

A highly collaborative venture between Swanbury Penglase and St Andrew’s School, the project was completed in early 2022 and has quickly become an important part of the School’s learning and teaching program.