McKinnon Secondary College Gymnasium

Completed last month, our contemporary, light-filled gymnasium for McKinnon Secondary College. Our brief was to create a standalone competition-grade facility on a green fields site intimately connected into the campus.

Partly crowd-funded by the school community through the purchase of inscribed bricks, the new gymnasium is the third major project H2o Architects has completed for the school. The new facility features basketball, volleyball and netball timber courts, change rooms, a kiosk, storage, car parking and office facilities to both the school and public as a ‘gym for hire’.

Our design response is a spacious, off white and simple pitched roof classical form with slender exposed structural steel work creating a functional and elegant, light-filled interior.

A feature of the naturally finished plywood and reconstituted woodwool interiors is the plywood dado accented by triangular ‘flags’ in school colours inspired by naval semaphores, which spell out the words GO MCKINNON on the west and south walls.

We’re thrilled to have also entered the McKinnon Secondary College Gymnasium into this year’s Victorian Architecture Awards. A special thank you to all the staff and students at McKinnon Secondary College, Principal Pitsa Binnon and Vice Principal Michael Kan, and the design and construction team: Gandy & Roberts Consulting Engineers, Fryda Dorne & Associates, Adams Consulting Engineers, and the builders, Jointly. At H2o, thank you Tim, Vieri and Teresa.

Positioned at the northern end of the campus as an object in the landscape, the gymnasium creates an important visual and functional connection with the main campus, forming a backdrop to outdoor sport activities and learning. Photo by John Gollings.