Positioned to align with the nearby START regional trade training centre on campus, the new Tech School has an identity of its own, connected to existing pedestrian, vehicle and transport networks, and the newly established campus “green spine”.
With a modest project budget and an aspirational brief, the Tech School will regularly accommodate up to one hundred secondary school students each day, who will attend the facility throughout the year, as an extension to their own school’s curriculum programmes. Programmes and activities will be scheduled across a day, a week, or an extended duration, allowing equitable access for students across the peninsula region.
A key planning and design principle was to realise a spatial and functional solution which would support the facility through its establishment, then allow it to continually evolve as industry partnerships, curriculum programs and digital technologies are realised. The facility has been conceptualised as a space of innovation and inspiration, inspiring and engaging students, with the design “DNA” supporting immersive activities, collaboration and student agency. Spatial planning enables independent and concurrent project-based activities within a uniquely adaptable environment. Digital and fabrication studios, supported by flexible systems infrastructure, allow the facility to evolve with new technologies and learning models.
Through aligning the required scope with the available budget, the design team worked to optimise the scale of the facility, the design aesthetics and the inbuilt amenity and technology. This was undertaken through balancing the need for design, without over design and configuration of bespoke spaces that may not be flexible in the long term. The approach undertaken was to provide a rational, volumetric and spatial envelope, supporting adaptable, responsive and interconnected spaces able to support advanced high-tech equipment and technologies.
Frankston Tech School is a uniquely high-tech learning environment, akin to an innovation hub – with design and technology at the heart of the settings and spaces within. It aims to provide a genuinely hyper flexible, “agnostic” high tech learning space that will evolve and develop in the years ahead.
