Marist College Bendigo
Champagnat - Stage 4
Location: Dja Dja Wurrung Country | Bendigo, Victoria Sector: Education Completion: 2018
Champagnat provides enriching environments that allow students within the Marist Approach to thrive as they mature into young adults. Specialist spaces complement more fluid independent and collaborative spaces, ensuring that learners have access to senior science spaces within an array of facilities. Educators and designers collaborated to ensure that areas reflected students learning needs.
The Senior Years Centre is a 3 story building and provides general learning areas, specialist science facilities and a 60 seat lecture theatre for Years 9-12 students and staff at Marist College. The building has external access at two levels, utilising the sites steepness. A double height atrium spine runs through the buildings heart and draws light into the deep floor plan.
The east wing accommodates the specialist science facilities with 2 chemistry labs, 1 biology lab and 1 physics/theory space. Each is flexible and multi-functional complemented by a shared science prep room and chemical storage. There is also a break-out meeting room adjacent to the theory space for isolated group discussion.
The ground floor houses the main entry and connects both the east and west wings. It is made up of varied small, medium and large flexible spaces that allow for dynamic group activities with flexibility of movable walls and furniture. Large span structure via a timber truss system and consistent grid layout allows for future layout modifications. All spaces are highly visible for maximum passive supervision and for sharing best practice teaching methods. Acoustics is provided through wall and ceiling treatments, soft furniture, carpets, hanging acoustic baffles and mobile joinery units.
The building provides students and staff with general learning facilities orientated at creating a sense of community. There are 2 large learning studios equivalent to the size of 7 GPLA’s with movable walls and flexible furniture which can be utilized to create make-shift break out spaces for varying teaching and learning scenarios. Entwined in the circulation space between these 2 large areas are communal, flexible break out spaces such as the Incubator, Group Meeting, Think Tank, Open Collaboration, Meeting Rooms and the Kitchen. Each space welcomes groups of students to gather for group or individual work and facilitates student collaboration.
“A specific example of the brilliance of the architectural design lies in Theatre 1. During construction, the builders came across a significant rock. The design was altered to form a ‘story wall’ of our connection to the very first Marist buildings in France, which were chiselled from similar rock. The theatre is now a dynamic learning space and sacred element of our culture.”
The first floor of the west wing provides another large learning studio similar to the ground floor, and also houses the 60 seat lecture theatre. The theatre cantilevers into the void of the double height atrium on the ground floor.
