 | URBANITY IN THE SUBURBS TAUT AND COMPACT, THE FIRST OF TONY CARO ARCHITECTURE’S WORKS FOR BROUGHTON ANGLICAN COLLEGE SKILFULLY INFILTRATES THE SCHOOL, LENDING IT A MEASURED YET INTIMATE URBANITY.
REVIEW LAURA HARDING PHOTOGRAPHY BRETT BOARDMAN
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The recently completed Senior Classroom Wing is the first element of Tony Caro’s masterplan for Broughton Anglican College.
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The double-storey verandah with its signature 63-metre-long precast concrete screen.
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View from
within the northern open end.
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Looking south down
the interior of the verandah.
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The battened timber
screens emerge at the ends from behind the concrete
screen.
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Timber seats and benches define the area
between the classrooms and the verandah.
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Tapered legs and timber screens underneath the
verandah facade.
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The Senior Classroom Wing
seen from the quadrangle.
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THE SOUTH-WESTERN FRINGES of Sydney are foreign territory for many
architects. While urban, coastal, rural and outback contexts have proved fertile ground
for architectural exploration, rarely is the profession asked to engage with the semi-rural
and suburban areas that characterize the periphery of the city. Given this, it is refreshing
to find a 27-hectare property at Menangle Park the site of a decisive masterplanning
initiative and architectural intervention by Tony Caro Architecture.
Broughton Anglican College was inaugurated in 1986, and has evolved as two
distinct schools on its expansive grounds. The Junior School comprises small
freestanding classroom buildings on landscaped terraces along the northern side of
the property. To the east, the Senior School is formed by traditional linear classroom
blocks and courtyards. The deficiencies of the bipartite campus structure led in 1998
to the commissioning of Tony Caro Architecture to prepare a masterplan for the site
which focused on reconnecting the disparate halves of the school and fostering a
unified collegiate identity.
Tony Caro’s masterplan is structured around an axis at the interface of the two
schools which cuts diagonally through a new quadrangle or “campus heart”. The
masterplan envisages a “public” building programme of library, auditorium and sports
centre defining the edges of the quadrangle. These elements are scheduled for
construction over the next five years. The recently completed Senior Classroom Wing
forms the eastern edge of the quadrangle, and as such is the element by which the
Secondary School addresses the new public space.
To the visitor, the existing Senior School is an impenetrable mix of single-storey
wings, courts, arcades, ramps and circulation spaces. Although formed by traditional
space-defining campus typologies, their arrangement is confused and the school’s
structure lacks cohesion and legibility. Confronted with the expansive and ill-defined
character of the existing campus, Tony Caro’s proposal shrewdly opts for compactness
and tautness. The modest programme of nine classrooms and staff facilities is carefully
interspersed between existing classroom wings and courts, fusing the ragged edge of
the Senior School and intensifying it at its point of connection with the new quadrangle.
Linking the new programme and defining the public edge is the protagonist of the
project – a double-storey verandah, enclosed on the upper level by a dramatic
63-metre-long precast concrete screen punctured by a capricious sprinkling of circular
openings. This public facade confronts the visitor on arrival. Encountered in true
elevation, the hovering roof edge and perforated concrete screen inscribe a strong
horizontal datum in the undulating topography, powerfully defining the school’s new
public space.
As its lineage, Tony Caro cites traditional courtyard-edge buildings in the manner of
Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital in Florence and Blacket’s Quadrangle at the University
of Sydney. Its solidity and scale and the masterplan’s diagonal focus also speak to the
original scheme by the Griffins for Newman College in Melbourne.
This descendant inventively recasts the solemnity and gravitas of traditional
cloisters. The Broughton cloister employs a tough and direct palette of off-form and
precast concrete, held above the ground on a series of tapered legs in playful defiance
of its gestural weight. A layer of warmer plywood linings and finely detailed timber
screens and benches fill in the muscular concrete structure, and the interplay of the two
orders gives the verandah spaces a rich depth of scale – alternately civic and inspiring
or intimate and personal.
School programmes inevitably become an exploration of the subtleties of scale.
Collegiate architecture must simultaneously give expression to the aspirations of the
individual, the camaraderie of the classroom group, and an appropriate institutional
identity for the collective. Tony Caro skilfully articulates these relationships at Broughton.
The project is generous to the existing building stock. Slots and setbacks, gaps and
slippages separate it from the existing fabric and allow the diminutive scale of the school
to key purposefully into the more public scale of the verandah and quadrangle.
The new classrooms have an appropriately modest character. The interiors are
economically finished and constructed. Proprietary windows and louvres are thoughtfully
located against walls or ceilings where they wash the interior surfaces with light. The
threshold between the classrooms and the verandah, defined by the deep off-form
concrete structure, is treated in a language of almost domestically scaled timber seats
and benches that provide small tactile spaces for refuge.
At the northern and southern edges of the project, battened timber screens provide
moments of transparency – elsewhere this is tightly controlled by the need for “focus” in classrooms. At the stairs, a gradation of light levels prepares the eyes for a return to
strong sunlight, and marks the transition from the studied concentration of the
classroom to the vibrant social atmosphere of the new quadrangle. This transparency
is less successful where the verandah element terminates and the western face of the
staff facilities is presented to the quadrangle. Battened timber screens are then asked
to take on the scale of the new quadrangle and they feel slightly tentative beside the
tour de force of the more powerful concrete elements.
The precast concrete screen has an undeniably strong graphic quality. One is quick
to make allusions – to the facade of OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bordeaux, or the
skylights and retaining walls of Mathias Klotz’s Colegio Altamira in Santiago, Chile, and
yes, also to that particular type of cheese. (The students affectionately refer to the
building as “the cheeseboard”.) This graphic strength does not diminish the project’s
experiential qualities. The verandah space is delightful. Circles of sunlight move across
the floor and a soft glow slips in above the screen to illuminate the outer edge of the
hovering roof. The thickness of the concrete screen eliminates glare, allowing framed
vignettes of sky and landscape to be presented to the viewer and reflected onto the
windows of the classrooms behind.
The screen is a compelling architectural element – simultaneously the vehicle for the
project’s most emphatic expression and most intimate encounters. From within, perfectly
framed circles of view become privileged moments owned by the individual. From the
quadrangle, the collective expression of these viewpoints is powerful and assured.
The objectification of the verandah element, and its weight in comparison to the
modest programme it services, invite a reading of the building as a Venturian “decorated
shed”. In isolation it is tempting to understand the project in these terms, but these
descriptions don’t grapple adequately with the complexity of the project’s relationship to
the existing school. They imply a certain aloofness of the facade, skin or signifier to the
more generic “other”.
The strength of this project is that it does not merely “clothe” or “face” the existing
school. It invades, grafts, insinuates and infiltrates. Some of the nicest moments of this
work are the understated ones – the interstitial spaces where the new and the old
almost touch, leaving small gaps and fissures that allow existing connections with the
school behind to be articulated and new links to be made. This complexity and a
practised manipulation of scale lend the project a measured urbanity. It is a welcome
alternative to suburban solitude and rural nostalgia on the metropolitan fringe.
LAURA HARDING WORKS WITH THE SYDNEY-BASED PRACTICE HILL THALIS ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PROJECTS.
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| Project Credits |
BROUGHTON ANGLICAN COLLEGE SENIOR CLASSROOMS BUILDING
Architect Tony Caro Architecture—project team Tony Caro,
Louise Chapman, Simon Anderson, Simon Swain, Roger
Rajaratnan. Client Campbelltown Anglican Schools Council.
Project manager Root Projects. Builder Gledhill
Constructions. Structural engineer Birzulis Associates.
Mechanical engineer MPI Consultants. Electrical
consultant Quiggin Cook and Associates. Hydraulic
consultant Whipps Wood Consulting. Quantity surveyor
Page Kirkland Partnership. Landscape architect Jane Irwin
Landscape Architecture. BCA consultant BCA Logic.
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