Location and Climate

The school was built to serve Buxton, a village with a population of 1400 and the adjacent smaller villages of Couridjah and Balmoral. Buxton is about 90 kilometres south west of Sydney. The site chosen for the new school is on the edge of Buxton's residential area, about one kilometre from its centre (a small cluster of shops). The land was previously pasture, overgrown with native grasses, with a row of poplar trees on the eastern boundary. The site is rectangular, sloping from west to east with a 1:20 grade and a total area of 29,736m2.

Buxton is in Australia's temperate climate zone, with slightly warmer summer and slightly colder winter temperatures than Sydney. Its average maximum summer temperatures range between 24 and 29.3 degrees Celsius and average minimum winter temperatures between 1.7 and 5.7 degrees Celsius, with 9am temperatures from June to August between 7.7 and 10.4 degrees Celsius. Relative humidity is between 30-65%. Thermal comfort design parameters were 22-26 degrees Celsius.

The site is exposed to cold south west winds in winter and cooling north east breezes in summer.

Available infrastructures include sealed road, electricity and town water, but no sewerage system. Public transport is poor (an intermittent local bus service) thus a school bus service is required, particularly as a number of the pupils live beyond Buxton.

                 Aerial view of Buxton Public School site

Building constraints

The site has two major physical constraints. It is in a mine subsidence area, which limits construction options (e.g. double brick) and it is bushfire prone, with a eucalypt forest on the western boundary, which meant buildings had to be set back by 30 metres.

Another constraint was budget: the building and works could not exceed by more than 5% the normal allocation for a primary school of the designated size. Similarly, the designers had to work with the Component Design Range (CDR) of plans, materials and elements that NSW Department of Public Works and Services had already developed for the client, the NSW Department of Education and Training. The aim was to improve on the environmental performance of the CDR and its various configurations, with any successful environmental initiatives to be incorporated into future schools.