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The ubiquitous café culture has also worked its way into
school and provides an easy eating and greeting space
for students, parents and staff.
“Dolly’s café has become a community facility that services
the needs of the community and has become a gathering
point; a focus and locus for the entire community.
It really has created our own community culture and the
way in which that mirrors the outside world. You will see
groups of parents and staff and students mixing in ways that
mirrors the outside world and brings this into St Michael’s
and that’s really very exciting.”
Other design keys include vertical timber screens across
key elevations and repeated textually within the central
learning and story-telling void. Corridors are rendered
irrelevant with glass and timber screens providing
transitional cues between learning spaces. A further clue to
the shared base level experience is that perimeter window
spaces are shared and experienced by students rather than
the privileged domain of teaching and administrative staff.
The whole purpose of
education is to turn
mirrors into windows.
SYDNEY J. HARRIS, JOURNALIST