Wurun Senior Campus → has won the 2022 New Educational Campus award and been honoured with a Special Commendation at the 2022 Learning Environments Australasia (LEA) Victorian/Tasmanian Chapter Awards recently.

The LEA Awards seek to bridge ‘…the interplay between teaching and learning methodology and space by identifying examples of good educational spaces where innovative architectural ideas successfully support an educational philosophy.’

Designed by GHDWoodhead and Grimshaw, Wurun Senior Campus is a new, highly sustainable, vertical campus that brings together students from two existing government schools - Collingwood College and Fitzroy High School - to expand the choice of subjects and better meet the needs of the senior students.

With capacity to accommodate 650 students. Wurun Senior Campus has been designed as a modern learning environment to facilitate different learning programs within an interdisciplinary model of learning and teaching that suits individual learning styles and offers a high degree of flexibility.

To achieve this, the design team focused on creating a tertiary-level education experience, enabling a self-directed and project-based approach to learning, and departs from traditional timetable models. This was the key strategy for supporting the schools’ ambition to help students build the ‘21st Century skills’ needed to be adaptable, innovative, and ready to navigate their future beyond high school certificates. 

Constructed as part of the regeneration of the historic Fitzroy Gasworks precinct in Melbourne’s inner north, the Wurun Senior Campus folds around a prominent corner site so that it may integrate with the precinct’s future sports complex. The design takes advantage of this positioning, with the building form stepping up along its length to create a series of landscaped outdoor terraces and an abundance of outdoor space.

In being designed to equip students with 21st century skills, each level provides specialist settings for performing arts, art and design, technology, science, food, resources centre and sports. Connections between these specialist precincts and the general learning hubs blur the traditional boundaries between subjects and encourage interdisciplinary learning.