The Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center is located on the Shoalhaven River near the town of Nowra on the south coast of New Wales. The role of this Education Center is to provide access to creative and educational opportunities through the development of the Bundanon properties as a living arts center. It provides living accommodations and range of other facilities with an educational focus up to 32 student artists. The new buildings of this Education Center are situated at the mid-rise of the hill and at the interface of the native and exotic landscape. Both are retained and legible from all areas of the new center. The new buildings are constructed with in-situ off-form reinforced concrete, steel and recycled hard wood fletched beams. They engage comfortably with the existing buildings organized in the landscape.  They shift the established regular geometry to accommodate the site’s immediate and distant topography, views, wind and sun and the differences in scale of the site’s various existing built and natural elements. The Center promotes a process of replenishment by being self-sufficient in water collection, storage and distribution, and includes an on-site sewage and waste water treatment servicing.

The Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center is a mature statement of architecture that responds to and enhances the quality of the landscape. It is a simple and poetic conception that picks up the spirit of the land and adds to the existing built and natural environment of the site. The architects have superbly balanced a fresh crafting of the building materials, a commitment for environmental enrichment by the creation of appropriate and well-grounded buildings. They have successfully demonstrated that good architecture draws inspiration not from a model or an image but from the constraints and opportunities of its location.

2000
KBDA
Award Winner