VISION 48 — GUIDING LIGHT
While real sustainability goes well beyond Green Star
ratings you have put great emphasis on locally-sourced
materials in that supply chain life, from cradle to grave.
We were very, very, focused on Australian suppliers and
even closer, local suppliers such as Viridian. We selected
materials with low embodied energy in their production,
with a long lifespan and so the whole life cycle costing.
The building itself is designed around sustainable design
practices. The orientation, overhangs, natural cross
ventilation and so on. It was designed from the ground
up on passive design principles and from the design and
supply-chain of sustainable products.
How do you hope it will be experienced by the passing
parade of motorists and pedestrians?
We had a very challenging brief needing to distil three
aspects into the brief, but at the forefront was the need
to deliver upon good urban design principles. We needed
robustness in the public realm fronting onto a main and
side road. We need to engage motorists in a different
way to pedestrians. The transparency at that pedestrian
level is also wonderful because you actually engage
directly with the teaching and learning.
Some projects are torturous, others occur organically.
How was the experience with this project?
The design process was quite cathartic. The school was
so engaged with design ownership from the start. We
knew we were going to deliver and we knew the success
from the first time we rolled out our drawings from the
first sketch. It’s one of those lovely projects that every
architect experiences. Every five or six projects one of
these come along and you just know it was meant to be
how it ends up, because it actually distils everything we
envisaged. It’s testament to the strong bonds in the
relationships formed at the start of a project.
“We were very, very, focused on
Australian suppliers and even
closer, local suppliers such as
Viridian. We selected materials
with low embodied energy in their
production, with a long lifespan...”
GARRY THOMPSON, ARCHITECT