St Joseph’s Nudgee College Bathersby Boarding Village
St Joseph’s Nudgee College Bathersby Boarding Village
M3Architecture
FIRM
M3Architecture
TYPE
Educational › High School
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2015
PHOTOGRAPHY
Christopher Frederick Jones
LOCATION
Brisbane, Australia
The Bathersby Boarding Village is akin to a castle in the centre of a city (the school). It is a place where every boy can feel like “the King of the Castle”.
Fort-like boarding houses have a long tradition in English schools. They offer appropriate frameworks for safety, security and community building.
The village is a home for 330 boys and associated supervisors. It brings together all four boarding houses into one complex, for the first time in the school’s history.
The building is a three-to-four storey castle wall, which encloses a private courtyard. There are common rooms and kitchens for groups to gather, and individual rooms for students to sleep and study.
Bathrooms are organised around vertical gardens and a lush courtyard plays host to community activities.
The castle wall and gates provide an appropriate sense of physical and psychological separation from the day school – it is a threshold into another world and a place to call home.
