St Michael’s Commons Building

The building

St Michael’s Grammar School is an Australian co-educational independent day school located in St Kilda, Victoria. The school was founded in 1895. The St Michaels site displays an array of school buildings dispersed around a relatively large parcel of land. The Commons portion of the school is the first St Michael’s building that genuinely caters for all St Michael’s students and staff from Kindergarten to Year 12. The Commons portion of the building affords environmental features such as passive heating and cooling coupled with energy-efficient glass, for efficiently regulating temperature. A ‘Vegetation wall’, is designed to provide naturally cooling the building and providing a pleasing view from Redan Street. An expansive central atrium provides the internal layout with abundant natural light via, creating a pleasant and energising interior with greatly reduced energy consumption.

The approach

A holistic approach was undertaken to provide a cost effective and safe building incorporating a combination of performance based design strategies. Due to the location of the Commons building and proximity to adjacent buildings flame projection, radiant heat analyses coupled with human movement calculations were used to demonstrate effective fire safety performance was achieved for occupants and fire fighters. The project was successfully delivered by the Scientific Fire Services team of engineers and construction was completed in 2014.