Education Design with Whisker Architecture

Live, Learn, and Work [in] Your Values. At Whisker Architecture we believe aligning the spaces we occupy with our values builds capacity for empathy, kindness, and generosity – and who wouldn’t want a world with more of that? Guided by your values, needs, and stakeholders, we investigate what is wanted and needed to design fit-for-purpose learning environments.
Since founding in 2020 we’ve been awarded contracts with 17 different schools including a $5m project at Watsonia North Primary School. Our goal is enjoyment of the spaces we create for decades to come, with minimal impact on the planet. If your School’s spaces are too small, too dark, or not aligning with the values and vision of your community – consider if building or renovating will address those frustrations. At Whisker Architecture we are also experienced at preparing full campus masterplans – which are great strategic pieces and an essential part of improving grant application outcomes.

Learning environment design and architecture for VSBA, Catholic, and Independent Schools in Victoria

Video Transcript

My name is Audrey Whisker, and I am the principal architect at Whisker Architecture. We are here to serve Victorian schools by creating physical spaces that support the values and pedagogical methods they aspire to. With over 10 years of industry experience, I've spent the majority of my career specialising in education design. This is because I believe in the power of spaces to influence human behaviour, designed to reflect our values and education to enable the next generation. I couldn’t do it alone, though. Winnie, Neil, and Michael will be intimately involved in many of our projects.

This is a list of relevant project experience for the education industry. Projects at the top are current Whisker Architecture projects. Projects below are ones that I personally delivered in my role as senior architect at Clark Hopson Clark Architects. Carnegie Primary School, Whittlesea Tech School, and Wellington Secondary College all received education design awards. Watsonia North Primary School, Bitton Primary School, and Our Lady of Fatima in Rosebud, amongst others, are examples of master planning projects. Carnegie Primary School, Ripley Primary School, and Brighton Beach Primary School were also particularly challenging as they involved altering 100-year-old heavy brick buildings. So we’re very familiar with the structural and historical elements and statutory triggers associated with projects of that nature.

Our experience on live school sites means that we understand the need for open communication, coordination, and flexibility to ensure that the project runs smoothly and doesn’t negatively impact the day-to-day operations of the school, particularly during the construction phase. Here at Whisker Architecture, we know how crucial communication is to ensuring a smooth process and a great project outcome, particularly during construction and on an active school site, and with complex stakeholder engagement. This attitude has fostered enduring relationships with our school partners, who entrust us with their visions time and time again.

Education architecture is our passion and purpose, making projects like the $4.9 million Watsonia North Primary School a milestone in our journey as a studio. This project represents a continuation of our commitment to education design. Part of that commitment is a guarantee that the architect interviewing for the project will remain with the project from start to finish, including running all stakeholder engagement workshops and contract administration with the builder.

It’s also important to take a moment to recognise the great businesses that we work with on these projects. This brilliant team also has a wealth of experience on education projects and forms a vital component in our ability to mitigate risks and deliver high-quality, on-time, and on-budget designs. Cortese Consultants, in particular, bring much-needed building services guidance and risk management projects at an early stage.

This is our ‘why’. We believe that every child deserves to feel safe, welcome, proud, and included. To support that vision, we believe that education spaces must be safe. By that, we mean safe and inclusive for all. This means safe to use and creating a sense of safety. Visibility is a great tool here. They need to be accessible, both through universal design principles such as the space being simple and intuitive to use, as well as requiring low physical effort. The spaces should be diverse, not only in terms of the learning settings and the furniture that we provide but also the group sizes supported. We want these spaces to be looked after, both in the sense of easily maintained spaces and materials but also in the sense of a space that engenders a sense of community ownership. We really want people to be able to look after their schools. And finally, engaging. These are spaces that students are spending so much of their time in, and we want them to be engaging for users. We want it to be a space that is fun, interactive, and inspiring.

How our ‘why’ plays out in a master planning process is through an extensive analysis of the existing and the proposed conditions to fully understand the opportunities, constraints, and impacts that we are proposing to make on a campus. In this example project, we specifically looked at massing on site, outdoor learning and play, site circulation, and project staging. So, at this scale, we’re really assessing the safety through the line of sight, zoning of access through the fencing strategies, accessibility through layering networks of paths of travel, and having a hierarchy to those paths of travel. Diversity of learning environments and the zoning of use ensure that we have zoning of certain play areas for each, the middle school, junior school, and senior school, for example. Making sure that we’ve got the zoning and diversity of learning environments through looking at making sure that we’ve got STEM spaces and general learning spaces and informal spaces. Making sure that everyone’s got as equitable access to those specialised areas as possible.

We also look at community ownership, so that looked after factor. We’re looking for areas where maybe community ownership can come into things like a bush tucker garden or a sensory play area, or even who’s going to be using the hall maybe after hours and how that will work and function. We’re also looking at engaging and fun designs, so making sure that we have passive and outdoor spaces as well as smooth connections between the buildings. We have a sustainability learning area, meeting spaces, hard courts, and green space. We’ve got a lot of different opportunities squeezed into what, in this case, is a small suburban primary school. Combining those elements with climate and building science factors will guide us to create a functional ecosystem that supports the educational vision of the school now and through future generations.

This is a great quote: "All we can know now about the world that she will step into is that it will have challenges and opportunities beyond what we can imagine today, problems and possibilities that will demand creativity and ingenuity, responsibility and compassion." It is difficult to fully appreciate the world that today’s students will step into when they finish school. Technology is evolving exponentially, and that change is shaping society in ways that we may not possibly be able to fully predict. But what we can predict, and what the data is showing, is that there will be an even greater emphasis on soft skills or social skills moving forward. The jobs of tomorrow don’t need workers; they need innovators and communicators.

Classroom design has changed a lot since the Industrial Revolution, but not all classrooms have. We know that this style of didactic and explicit teaching is no longer what our students need. In the words of Stoll and Fink, "many schools are good schools if only it were 1965." But it’s not; it’s not 1965. So what are we going to do about it? How are we seeing these societal changes reflected in the learning environments is a greater emphasis on communication, collaboration, and agility.

These five learning setting categories were inspired by Linking Pedagogy and Space by Ken Fisher and the design thinking methodology. They encourage a diversity of learning styles across the curriculum and the learning day and can and should be applied to indoor and outdoor learning environments and to both the master planning and the detailed design process. An inquiry learning model is one of the most powerful tools that we know of to instil a love of lifelong learning. And if you have not yet seen the film Most Likely to Succeed, I highly recommend you watch it. It is based on a high school in the USA, but the power of learner-led education is truly compelling, and it really informs how we design our spaces.

This is an example of how those learning settings are played out in a recent primary school project. We ran consultation with the school leadership, the school council, the students, and the staff during this process. And in the words of a mentor of mine, "We design with our clients, not for them." So we look forward to designing with each and every one of the schools that we work with to discover what their specific educational vision looks like and translating that into a physical space. When we work with these schools, we will be looking to integrate diverse and agile learning settings, include messy activity areas and presentation spaces, performance opportunities, team teaching spaces, acoustically isolated spaces for large and small groups, indoor-outdoor connections with draw rooms, quiet reflection zones, and generally just sensory differentiation.

In this project, we were looking at some grooved panelling so that when you walk down the corridor, you can touch the walls and bring yourself back to the physical world with some sensory stimulation. You can see here that we’ve also done a study of looking at different size groups in different spaces and how that supports the diversity throughout the day. So there are many different combinations, obviously, in these spaces, but just making sure that we’re having conversations about how we can gather as a full school, where we can have small discussion spaces, and where we’ve got intimate conversation corners as well, and how that works with the school and how they want to use the space. To me, this quote really emphasises the importance of the ability to transition between learning settings.

One of the things that we see a lot in schools is that there is an acknowledgement of the need for different learning settings, but there’s not always an expertise in how to transition between those learning settings. And that’s where working with built environment professionals can really elevate a design. We understand not only which spaces we need but when we need small withdrawal spaces, when we need larger spaces, when we need messy activity areas. We understand how to make those spaces work for the way that the learners are going to use those spaces so that there are active and fast-paced spaces when learners need them and slower and calmer spaces when learners need those.

Creating quality opportunities to learn and play outside is a priority. Research shows that fresh air, sunlight, sensory experiences, coupled with movement, are all demonstrated to improve learning outcomes. We believe that outdoor learning environments should be held to the same standards as indoor learning environments. They should be easily accessible, safe, designed for purpose and for the intended learning setting. They should be learning environments, not just places that we thought of as, "Oh, we’ll just throw

something outside," or a token outdoor learning space.

There are so many opportunities for outdoor learning, particularly when it comes to providing diverse settings and choice for students. We often see students who struggle in the indoor classroom really shine when they’re given an opportunity to work outside. So creating quality outdoor spaces is a priority for us, and it should be a priority for everyone when we’re looking at a full campus master plan. One of the many opportunities that we see for the future is a seamless blend of indoor and outdoor learning environments.

A concept that we are exploring with some of our clients is the idea of an Australian version of the Reggio Emilia approach, which started in Italy. This means that as well as facilitating an inquiry approach, we’re really looking at the physical space as the third teacher. These designs place as much emphasis on the outdoor learning spaces as the indoor learning spaces, and it’s about this seamless blend of not seeing the outdoors as a separate part of the school but as an integrated part of the education ecosystem.

The Victorian Government has an ambitious plan to ensure that we have the educational facilities that our students need to thrive into the future. This is so exciting and represents a real opportunity to support future-ready students and create an education system that we can be proud of. It represents an opportunity to look at each school campus as an education ecosystem and really work with those schools to deliver the education outcomes they need to see. We really look forward to working with each of these schools to discover what their educational vision is, to really define what that education ecosystem looks like, and how we can deliver on that to support them in the future.