Futuro Early Learning Centre

Dharug & Dharawal Country

Scale, form and material relate to children’s sense of self within a space.

Futuro Early Learning Centre

Dharug & Dharawal Country

The design for a new learning centre embodies the principles of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, as well as prioritising sustainable building materials and construction.

The emphasis is on how the scale, form and material of the architecture can relate to a child and their sense of self within a space.

The Centre is one of two new facilities for Jeckra and will accommodate 136 children aged 0-5 years old. It acts as a community hub, forging a relationship with a new K-12 school next door and a proposed residential re-development of the surrounding agricultural land.

The latent traces of a creek line on the site speak to the form of the land, and the way water moves through it and the types of vegetation that would have been endemic, informed a strategy for thinking of the building ‘from outside in’.

A space for community forms the hearth of the centre and visually connects to the nature playground beyond. A place to play and stay, encourage participation, to share, to listen, to grow.

The building and landscaped areas are universally accessible. Open spaces connect to the land – what the site was before and how these qualities can be re-conceived spatially and materially to reinforce play and learning.

We thought carefully about how an architecture comprising standard elements could achieve diversity through pattern in repetition. And how these could be combined with a systematic construction methodology that allows for many building components to be pre-fabricated and assembled. As a result building elements in the learning pods are designed to be repeatable across the site and a future second site nearby. These learning pods are designed to achieve operational carbon neutrality and constructed to achieve neutral embodied carbon.

 

Project Team

Sam Crawford, Justine Anderson, Shane Marshall, Charly Watson, Caitlin Condon, Justin Pak, Jarrod Ruchalski

Client

Jeckra