Motueka High School is a state-funded school with a population of 673 students, located on Iwi owned land in the rural town of Motueka. It was established in 1955 and although the majority of its core building stock was constructed shortly after it was founded, sprawling haphazard additions to existing buildings over time have resulted in a disjointed campus.
Despite its functional limitations the school has managed to establish a diverse and inclusive environment, with a supportive and collaborative community of learning. The master plan was developed to provide the physical armature to reflect and reinforce the school’s philosophy as it moves towards a roll of 1,000 students.
Consultation with multiple stakeholders resulted in a bold proposal to overhaul a significant portion of the site, a move supported by the MoE’s design review panel. Each stage was carefully assessed as a potential end point to ensure that the school would continually benefit.
This is a new 2-storey mass timber teaching block for the Ministry of Education. The design is an evolution of the blocks we designed for Waimea College, implementing lessons learnt and maximising the efficiency of a mass timber structure for this typology in Aotearoa.
The Ministry’s brief was to follow the ‘Waimea’ model to show how it can be adapted to different situations. This model allows for standard and specialist teaching spaces to be repeated in a linear manner, while allowing for a degree of flexibility regarding openings between classrooms. E.g. the whole floor could operate as one large open-plan environment if the school’s pedagogy requires this. In this instance the school required individual classrooms
