Suters Architects’ Maribyrnong Sports Academy at Maribyrnong Secondary College was highly commended in the Public Design award category at the Australian Interior Design Awards 2011 earlier this year.
The first of its kind in Victoria, the Sports Academy is a purpose-built facility for achieving excellence in sport. The facility can be used seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, by both the school and the local community and enables talented student athletes to balance their academic and sporting goals in an athlete-friendly setting.
The concept for the building is based on the idea of precognition or pre-visualization – focusing on the goal. As a form of spatial precognition, the design provides early spatial hints and snapshots of the moments that an elite sports star will experience. The underbelly of a stadium, entering a sporting arena, the running track, the corporate box, the hall of heroes are all experiences that will form the psyche of every sports star.
Despite the specialized nature of the Sports Academy, the design needed to consider the needs of the wider school community while accommodating and integrating the needs of the school’s physical education curriculum. As a result, the flexible and adaptable facility caters for not only the students of the entire elite sports program but also to all the other students and staff of the Maribyrnong Secondary College. Suters hopes that the centre will become a community asset for the people of Maribyrnong.
