There is the barest enclosure of the amphitheatre space, as the building floats in its asphalt campus non-plan. At one end, the space under the ramp creates its own experience, and at the entry there is the faintest reminiscence of Harvard UniversityвЂ™s Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts вЂ“ where the ramp in Le CorbusierвЂ™s 1963 project creates a foreground to the buildingвЂ™s background and bisects the space below. Behind and in front is a small garden and beyond that, the ramp negotiating the sloping site. The ribs that form the facade hover over as they bend out to form the projecting eave. The facade in front is so close, with the stage almost non-existent. The steps are sunken in a super-compressed amphitheatre. It is a public event space, easy to imagine filled with participants and onlookers, but with an unusual proportion. There is a key moment in this design: the experience of being seated on the concrete steps facing the front facade. The amphitheatre provides external social and teaching areas It is so often assumed that a building is the neutral container for a set of social activities, but this is anything but a neutral container. As a simple machine for tempering the environment, the building can be a concrete teacher of how it regulates its own comfort.Д«ut what of the other architectural moves and their capacity to teach spatial intelligence and to leave an enduring image on those who visit and learn here? What does this design, its spaces and its decorated surfaces, give to that experience? The KIOSC website, set up before construction, still makes no mention of the building that houses it. Likewise, the building exhibits a broad range of features that are now, thankfully, mainstream building techniques вЂ“ a mixture of passive solar design, water and material recycling and power generation through photovoltaic and geothermal energy. The main corridor connects the teaching spaces The school principals were key motivators for the project вЂ“ facilities such as this should be appreciated and replicated.

It is described as a trade-training centre, with an emphasis on green jobs and training for new economies and industries. This is not to dismiss the first two points: the building is a result of a collaborative program called the Knox Innovation, Opportunity and Sustainability Centre (KIOSC) between Swinburne University and a number of secondary schools in the City of Knox, in MelbourneвЂ™s east a program where students visit the university campus and experience interactively some of the science in our environment. This building is about the capacity of architectural design to trigger a response to the environment and to contribute to questions of that environmentвЂ™s future. It could also be about the delivery of measurable outcomes for sustainable design, but it is more than that too. The story of this building could be about innovative education in sustainability, though it is more than that.

Mdeca kiosc