mowbray college

1982-1995

melton

Mowbray College is a new school located 38 kilometres from Melbourne in the satellite town of Melton. It was built following a failure by the Education Department (State Government) to respond to a need in the Melton community for additional educational facilities dating back to the early 1980's. A community cooperative of concerned citizens was then formed who provided guarantees, planning and their own time to enable the school to come into existence.

Melton is a relatively benign landscape, recently rural, which experiences harsh winds and dry summers.   The Toolern Vale hill provides a backdrop to a suburb dominated by A.V. Jennings houses.   By closely-knit relationships between the inaugural school principal (Alan Patterson) and the broader Mowbray family of parents, staff, students and their architects   - we have taken regional materials and aesthetics and given them new life and meaning.

The architecture is designed to symbolise the school community's hopes, aspirations and spirit . It is an ordinary aesthetic, made extraordinary, it redefines our view of suburbia with optimism and delight, with low cost architecture, closely argued as design which celebrates Mowbray's educational philosophy.

There is no set plan, zoned diagram nor preferred set for the campus.   A process of creation is the force behind the development rather than a diagram. As a result, we develop large clumps of spaces and places along with discrete elements, so all contribute.

The urban design model used for the school operates as follows:

1. A whole vision (not a plan) for the campus as an organic village.

2. A process for developing each part so it becomes the total development.

3. A community of people and their interests, which initiate the creative process.

4. Equal importance of large and small elements.

Mowbray College is part of an architectural investigation of contemporary culture, an experiment using architecture as a medium for theory.

This school is a critique of that suburban aesthetic (not negative aspects of it) which develops the positives, to see what we could achieve of that architectural language.

We have used an 'AV Jennings' language of spoutings and ordinary timber window frames and cream, brown and red bricks, along with simple gable roofs, front gardens and fences.   To that we add critical dimension:   the scale of windows, screens, sunshades and roofs are designed to draw attention to their original possibilities so we appreciate them afresh.

The Mowbray community sees   the school as an interim place between home and community for their children which they want to develop as an educational village. The school is a small city pattern with side streets, lanes, arcades and so on, where individual classrooms are arranged as 'houses' (or homerooms) and larger facilities as community foci. The pattern of streets and accidental corners are developed to appear disordered and unplanned.

There are a series of other developments occurring in other buildings to provide axial centres over the site and there are 'slippery' corners that deny those controls, and along the walkways and left over spaces of the campus children gather, meet and stroll.  

There was the fundamental desire to build Mowbray's functional and educational program (in a spiritual way) into our buildings, which we have interpreted as the character of the school and which produces not only a library (which also operates as classrooms) but also in the one building a reading room for toddlers, a senior study room (on top of the drum), a meeting room for parents, and a debating chamber.   It is also used for drama.   Mowbray buildings need to be more than a mere single purpose facility.

We don't believe in the concept of multi-purpose rooms, so it was a matter of building a space that would allow those things to happen within the restrictions of the structure and the volume that we could provide and allowing the architecture of space, form, detail and connecting spaces to adapt to the different uses.

Mowbray College is a professional diary of the experiment and development of architectural ideas, written with the consent and help of hundreds of participants within the school community - the architecture   is made with   open references to the   past and is designed to enable   an architectural   and educational future.