2012 AILA National Landscape Architecture Award: Planning

Bonner P-6 School & Aboriginal & Torres Straight Islander Learning & Cultural Centre by Harris Hobbs

Client: ACT Education and Training Directorate

Jury comment

The landscape and external environment planned for this School provides a sensitive reading of the environments inhabited by all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples over the continent and islands of Australia. These inherent values of the client have been carefully planned into the ‘school’ and site so that the landscape does the informing and teaching.

This has formed a very sound platform for the deliverance of an embedded cultural response for all children and residents of Canberra. The theory of the landscape has been fused with the practice of the planned use of space. “The planned school delivers on the educational and curriculum based brief, with regard to the functions of the external spaces.”