Nunawading Community Hub Australia, Melbourne Building Project, Victoria Architecture Development Images

Nunawading Community Hub in Victoria, Australia

9 June 2023

Design: fjcstudio

Location: Nunawading, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Photos by John Gollings

Nunawading Community Hub, Australia

“This white, seamless backdrop celebrates people and their creativity, their activity and their sense of togetherness. It celebrates the highly valued park and school building, integral to the memories and future lives of Nunawading’s community.”

An open and inviting public place, expressing a sense of equitable access for all

The Nunawading Hub Community Centre is located on the old Nunawading Primary School site. The new community centre is designed with a variety of spaces to learn, meet and collaborate, offering different indoor and outdoor environments, catering for different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

The hub includes the surrounding landscape, incorporating the old school oval and school house. The oval has been converted into a new community park overlooking Tunstall Park, located on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Large First Nations’ gatherings were once held here. The Nunawading Community Hub has become a new place of gathering, a place to once again share knowledge.

Retaining the heritage schoolhouse, located at the threshold of the site, was a key design objective. By retaining the local materiality it celebrates the collective memory of many who spent their childhood there. The heritage school building offers smaller scale counselling rooms and large flexible meeting spaces, all with high levels of acoustic privacy. Meals-on-Wheels and a pottery studio occupy the lower level of the new building, with dining areas on the upper level open to the redeveloped landscape and Tunstall Park.

Abstract white forms rise up as a backdrop to the heritage fabric, the park and to community life. The scheme creates a certain monumentality whilst playfully developing a dialogue with surrounding post-war boom homes, through its roof profile. This white, seamless backdrop celebrates people and their creativity, their activity and a sense of togetherness. The architecture was designed with simple forms, each a response to the environmental framework (proportion and scale), while symbiotic to the functional, pragmatic and environmental control requirements. Designed to a constrained budget, considered design and detail have been delivered with a simple palette.

The building is accessed at varying points across the sloping site, connecting to the landscape and public domain, via sweeping curved paths and landscape walls. Existing trees were retained and integrated with a vast range of new trees and plantings. The oval drives the highly transparent park interface.

This place is truly democratic, catering to widest and most specific needs of its community. A timber lined basketball stadium provides state-of the-art sport facilities. A dance hall and function space are designed for multipurpose use. Twenty-six different community groups are brought together under a single purpose-built facility, catering their unique requirements, including those of the Nunawading Lapidary Club, Whitehorse Arts Association and the local chapter of the U3A.

A successful community building responds to the needs of the people who use it, recognising its importance in society and community life. Through our many community based projects, fjmtstudio has developed a high level of understanding of the elements required to develop an engaging and contemporary community facility.