Surry Hills Community Centre breathes
The new Surry Hills Community Centre at 405 Crown Street with library, meeting rooms and a childcare centre was officially opened on Saturday. A crowd filled the adjacent square on Crown Street to hear Lord Mayor Clover Moore speak and join Uncle Max in a traditional smoking ceremony.
The $20m building was designed with sustainability in mind. The south face is a double glass wall containing transparent floor-to-roof cooling towers which circulate cool air from beneath the centre, passing across greenery and through natural rubble filters to create low-energy air-conditioning.
The external louvres on the Crown Street side automatically track the sun, letting it in for winter and excluding it in summer. The upstairs outdoor children’s play area enjoys moveable shadecloth which automatically rolls in and out triggered by the amount of sunlight.
Both these automatic features are powered by solar collectors which do not store power but generate it during the day when it is most needed. The building collects and recycles rainwater for toilet flushing and watering the plants in the cooling towers and on the green roof.
“We designed the systems to be not only functional and operable but transparent and visible,” said architect Richard Francis James.
“As the building was finished and enclosed, you could notice there was none of that ‘new building’ smell because we chose materials that avoided off-gassing.”
There are computer rooms set up for e-learning courses and the library is a free wi-fi hotspot. Parents of children enjoying the play area said the queue for enrolment was already formidable.
by Michael Gormly
