Sunbury Community Arts & Cultural Precinct

The site's difficult history sits alongside today’s ambitions for creativity, community and care. The project adapts a former Female Refractory Ward, out-building and de-institutionalised health precinct into a vibrant, diverse arts & cultural hub. Its evolution offers the opportunity to augment its past while shaping a more open, connected and caring future. However, this presents challenges in how to undertake this work respectfully and carefully, in an effort to avoid sanitising uncomfortable truths. The age and condition of the inherited buildings demand onerous maintenance regimes alongside inspirational, reflective and sustainable design - often requiring nimble problem solving of unexpected latent conditions.

Our design response could be described as surgical, working closely with heritage advisors, Heritage Victoria, Traditional Owners, community and stakeholders to ensure interventions are sensitive and nuanced. A consultative approach was taken, strategically injecting vibrancy and joyful celebration to a unique setting, providing upgrades to these spaces without obscuring prior usage histories. Colours, materials and form were influenced by layered contexts. The heritage setting provided cues for tone and volume, while creative inhabitants make their mark physically in detailed moments of relief and celebration. Community contributions include handmade ceramic tiles from potters and timber benches and features by wood-workers.

The project supports a vision to create a vibrant hub of community activity by delivering spaces that support a mix of creative, community and organisational uses, helping to generate local economic benefit and support long-term sustainability. Supporting arts and culture in a peri-urban context with measurable social benefits, including for health and well-being, community cohesion and productivity. Buildings with difficult histories are plentiful and often developed with little or no regard for these pasts, leading to unrecoverable losses or sitting dormant as 'too hard'. This project attempts to lean into an uncomfortable truth to examine and layer these narratives.

- Community Theatre & Annex Building.The converted theatre; an intimate and rich acoustic setting contrasts the light, bright, masonry court-yarded spaces that surround. A new annex building creates a generous, timber-clad 'warm' foyer space, enabling events to gather.- Community Art Gallery.This space preserves disused 'cells', transforming them into small gallery 'pockets', maintaining their legibility and scale. Where brick walls have been removed, their traces left exposed to tell stories of the not so distant past. - Community Potters.Anchored to a large Refractory corner room, the makers space is framed by remnant features of the Victorian building with brightly coloured insertions inspired by the markings of the potter.- Community Workshop.This project adaptively reuses an under-utilised 1960’s ‘out-building’; buildings such as these are plenty, and often demolished to make way for more novel forms of architecture - this is an example of an alternative strategy. Brightly coloured new interfaces inject clear divisions of space, improving building amenity. A new roof, solar array and water tank provide opportunities for precinct renewable energy and supply. - Connected and Accessible Landscape.New accessible pathways, inviting gardens and shelters connect a vast precinct broadening community engagement and opportunities to relate to one another and utilise the precinct.