The redevelopment of the Yarraville Special Developmental School replaces functionally inadequate buildings with a new Junior Learning Community building, Community Hall, and outdoor play spaces where students aged 5 to 18 years with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities can safely move and self-regulate, empowering them for success in structured learning activities.

Completed

2023

Traditional Owners

Bunurong people

Project Type

Special Needs

Client

Victorian School Building Authority

Observing and learning

Despite extensive experience in special school design, we set aside preconceived notions and any desire to impose a solution. Close collaboration with the school allowed us to address sensory design considerations unique to its student body and add to our practice’s ever-growing knowledge base of designing for children who are neurodivergent.

From the beginning of this project we embraced an open, consultative process with the staff to learn from their way of thinking and their teaching experiences. This was achieved by participating in an ‘observer role’ in three classrooms across different student age groups so that we could fully understand the challenges faced in teaching and learning in the existing spaces. Our observations became invaluable to the formulation of the brief.

Therapeutic spaces

A key aim of the project was the creation of therapeutic spaces through a phenomenological rather than a solely technological lens. Every effort was made to improve teaching and learning outcomes through ways intrinsic to the architecture, i.e. a considered use of colour, light, materiality, acoustics, and shaping of space, enhanced by student devices and digital media as learning and teaching tools.

Curved walls shape outdoor play spaces externally and form retreat spaces internally, while deep window reveals create seating alcoves in each learning base and on the external façade, providing students a variety of spaces they can choose from to self-regulate away from others, thereby giving them agency in their learning.