In 2019 Kennedy Nolan was engaged to design this new Junior Secondary College on a semi-rural site on the fringe of the Victorian coastal town of San Remo. The design of an entirely new school was an incredible opportunity for site planning, integration and re-establishment of landscape, explorations in identity in the build form and exemplary ESD. The delivery of this project was an exercise reconciling the authorities brief, the values of school community and the complex site constraints.
Bass Coast Junior Secondary College is a complete campus built to a LTE of 500 for year 7 – 9 students for the existing and emerging Bass Coast communities. The project saw the development of 5 facilities arranged around a central civic ‘heart’:
- Welcome & Wellbeing – housing administration, library and wellbeing provides a welcoming community presence to the street interface.
- Community & Health – the sports stadium, performing arts & food tech building supports afterhours and community use.
- Learning Base – flexible general learning building catering to a variety of learning modes and group sizes
- Specialist Hub – science labs, tech workshops and adaptable project areas support a broad curriculum
- Innovation – housing a combination of both specialist and general learning areas and giving opportunity for the school to run a more integrated curriculum for a particular year level or learning group.
- A strong and functional site wide landscape plan, and a coordinated infrastructure and traffic plan to tie the site into the greater neighborhood context.
This design process and the subsequent documentation and construction followed a ‘Design & Construct’ model of procurement was achieved within extremely tight time frame to achieve the target of opening for the school year in January 2022.