The Giraffe Early Learning Centre project is situated in Sydney, Australia, close to one of the city’s iconic beaches (Manly). The project principally involved the restoration and reuse of a piece of Sydney’s industrial heritage – a decommissioned electricity substation that had supplied the surrounding suburbs since 1928. The brick substation building is heritage listed and protected on the register of state-significant buildings in New South Wales, occupying a prominent street corner in an otherwise typical Sydney suburban context.
The project was focused on converting and extending the heritage building into a purpose-built kindergarten / early learning centre for over 140 children. The site, largely occupied by the heritage building, is also steep and surrounded by suburban houses requiring substantial protection from noise. The new addition is nestled behind the 3-storey volume of the original substation to provide new classrooms and play areas, while in the portions of the site not occupied by the heritage building a large basement was excavated into Sydney sandstone to provide on-site pick-up and drop-off arrangements for children.
The main street elevation uses an extruded terracotta system, using a varying combination of 150mm and 300mm horizontal tiles on a rail system to create a pixelated brick-bond pattern, to establish a link to the heritage brickwork of the substation itself.
The colours of this façade are earthy reds, browns and beiges mimicking the sandy and brown coloured bricks of the heritage building, including the red brickwork trims around the main entrance and windows. Similarly, the abstract pattern echoes the predominant use of brick in the houses surrounding the site. Elsewhere, the project uses typical suburban materials from weatherboard to corrugated iron, working with the materials of the residential context typical in the Sydney suburbs. The rear playground sits over the car parking basement as a series of terraced platforms,conceptually considered as a ‘shed-turned-cubby house’ employing a playful composition of windows at both adult and children height in a combination of shapes, sizes and abstract composition.
Colour is used throughout the design of the centre to produce a playful interior aesthetic. With a limited budget and restricted materials, colour was considered an important way to create wayfinding to reveal the spatial organization of the centre’s complex circulation path, to create differentiation between spaces and elevate the interiors through playful but complementary colour schemes. Colours were also used in a didactic fashion; bright red used on structural elements to reveal the key diagrammatic relationships of the framed structures, and on fire-egress doors to easily identify critical routes in and out of the centre. Acoustic baffles suspended from ceilings are also used to create a unique spatial quality.
Designed with narrow floor depths between operable glazing to promote cross-ventilation and passive shading awnings, the design takes a passive approach to sustainability to minimize the use of artificial lighting, heating and cooling through first principles in the centre’s organization.
Material Used:
1. Argeton“Tampa“ Terracotta Façade System
2. Lysaght CustomOrb “Zincalume”
3. James Hardie “Scyon: Linea”
4. Danpalon 16mm Multiwall “Opal”
5. Regupol Rubber Flooring (multiple specifications)
