The renovation of the old QCWA building will, for the first time, establish BGGS’ presence on both sides of Gregory Terrace, with the Senior School to the north and Junior School to the south. In this way, each sub-school will read the other.
The call from the school was to create a Junior School that invokes a sense of innocence, curiosity and playfulness.
The Senior School’s Master Plan sees it as a microcosm of the city, resulting in a series of idiosyncratic and highly differentiated buildings. Unlike the Senior School, the Junior School is to be a whole school in one building – a microcosm of the Senior School, its little sister.
BGGS has emphatic identity – educationally and architecturally. The proposal references the significant buildings of the Senior School in the creation of an amalgamated miniature.
Miniatures are inherently interesting, typically occurring in toys, playgrounds and movies. The scale shift has a certain operative effect, enabling the child (in all of us) to be enchanted. Miniatures revere their subject and enable comprehension. They are exacting without replication, and with scaling down comes intimacy and craft. All of these qualities are entirely welcome in a Junior School environment.
The outcome will be a vertical village in miniature, creating functional legibility, stimulating vertical movement and pre-empting times to come. Though its constituent parts are referential, the whole is another idiosyncratic differentiated building for the year 5/6 girls of 2026.