Delacombe Gymnasium is a new competition-grade indoor sporting facility that acts as a ‘front door’ for the Delacombe Primary School, as well as providing high-quality facilities for the wider Delacombe community. The design considers the importance of connection, with a shift from a community urban frontage to a smaller campus scale, allowing for a transition that responds proportionally to its contrasting environments.
An extensive stakeholder engagement process at the beginning of the masterplanning process established community connection, scale and connectivity, and landscape connection as the key drivers to shape the overall brief.
This project represented a significant opportunity to create an important piece of community infrastructure for the Delacombe area. Every aspect of the design was examined for functionality and amenity that would appeal to a broad range of community groups, so long as it did not detract in any way from the school’s requirements.
The different volumes of the building are carefully arranged to present the largest mass to create a civic presence to the street, stepping down to a single storey form at the back, scaled to the student and campus.
The brief called for a high-quality facility where the entire school community could come together to foster positive and productive relationships between staff, students, parents and the wider public. This included the need for highly flexible spaces that can accommodate not only Delacombe Primary School staff, but given its size and AV infrastructure, host staff from other schools in the main gymnasium space for large scale training events.
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