The brief that wasn’t the brief

Sydney Montessori School was expanding. After years of running primary years on the Gymea campus, the school was bringing High School students on board and needed the facilities to support them. Science laboratories, a commercial kitchen for arts and food technology, flexible teaching spaces, offices, and a 27-space carpark to handle the increased numbers.

The brief was sound. New buildings that met flood requirements, suited the Montessori learning system, and made the most of the available sites. Three clear requirements, all legitimate. What the brief couldn’t account for was what happens when a school that already operates across 14 separate land parcels tries to deliver new buildings and infrastructure across four of them at once. Different titles, different conditions, one campus that has to read and function as a continuous whole.

The call that mattered

The instinct on a project across multiple parcels is to treat each site as its own project. Different titles, different constraints, different approval pathways. It’s cleaner to manage and easier to document. It’s also the wrong answer for a school.

The decision was to design the Science and Arts Buildings as a single piece of work across both sites, even though the sites were separately titled. One campus, one architectural language, one strategy for how the buildings sat in relation to each other and to the existing school. The flood requirements, the Montessori pedagogy, the protection of the productive landscape that already lived on the site were all problems that became easier to solve once the campus was treated as continuous rather than fragmented.

That decision was tested at Construction Certificate stage. The BCA reads boundary distances based on title boundaries. Two buildings on adjacent sites, separately titled, get treated as if they’re on neighbouring properties owned by strangers, even when both properties belong to the same school operating as one campus. Standard fire separation rules would have forced a redesign or significant compromise to the buildings the school had already approved.

The call was to pursue a performance solution rather than redesign for a deemed-to-satisfy pathway. That meant working with a fire engineer, the certifier, and the broader consultant team to demonstrate that the fire safety outcomes were equivalent or better than the standard pathway would deliver. It took longer and required more work. It also protected the design and the school’s expansion plan.

Where it landed

The Science and Arts Buildings opened with full High School facilities operating across the Gymea campus. Science laboratories, a commercial kitchen, flexible teaching spaces, offices, and the 27-space carpark connected by raised crossings and improved footpaths to the rest of the school. The productive landscape that had been on the site, including the chook shed and fruit trees, was relocated and protected rather than removed.

The buildings were delivered by Trescon, with the fire performance solution developed alongside the project’s fire engineer and certifier. The result is two buildings on two sites that read as one campus, supporting a Montessori High School that now has the infrastructure to match its ambition.