Why informal?
Education is an activity that should be continued outside of the formal curriculum, many people participate in non-formal learning but fail to purposely engage with informal education. The act of continuing education throughout one’s life is becoming more common but also more and more necessary to adapt to the changing world around us. Throughout the pandemic the need for this continued learning was made suddenly clear, with many people out of work and needing to find a way to fill this time of unemployment that could communicate to employers the type of person they are. Through learning new programs, skills or even just improving existing skills, people found ways to fill the void of work, through informal education. Leveraging this changing mindset and movement toward continued professional and personal education, Overflow is an exploration of how a physical space could be created to support the evolving nature of informal education and place it within the Australian psyche to legitimize it as part of the educational network.
A new sort of learning hub will be created in Overflow.
Shining a light on the role education spaces have within the community and encouraging an economy of knowledge sharing.
Large Scale
The large scale architectural elements speak to a re-insertion of the existing to create an accurate reading of the interior while providing new spaces within which education can thrive.
Room Scale
At the room-scale the contrasting language of organic forms is juxtaposed against the rigid existing to articulate the new ideas given a protective shell to grow within.
Detail Scale
The detailing focuses on continuing the organic language and solving functional issues. It moves between concealed elements that play into the new language of the design and exposed fixings that hint at the existing construction.
The void is one of the core large-scale insertions in the space, present throughout every floor, it is the inserted oculus through which education can be viewed.
