Syndal South Primary School is an educational hub in the leafy urban area of Mount Waverley on the lands of the Woi Wurrung Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the new Block A building of Syndal Primary School replaces an aging asbestos laden LTC building with new Administrative offices, Junior Classrooms, and a publicly accessible Library. The design proposal aims to contextualise the proposed Block A in its suburban setting by incorporating familiar domestic archetypes of the front porch and the verandah into circulation spaces and thresholds. The majority of the spaces are consolidated under a single roof which pitches north and south in deference to the neighbourhood street and to avoid overshadowing of existing hardcourt play areas. The building straddles domestic and civic scales and re-interprets cornerstones from the home and the neighbourhood into an education typology; such that public facing areas are scaled generously for social gathering, while learning and working areas are porous and scaled intimately for focus. Bookending the entry forecourt, the school funded Library pavilion greets visitors and is flexible for both its roles as quiet reading spaces during school hours and open community hub after.

Entry to the school is organised in a pinwheel configuration with wayfinding as a priority. New families and visitors needed to be able to navigate intuitively at the entry point - to reception, to the library, to the central sports courtyard, to the meeting rooms. Views are choreographed; the Library is connected to the administrative areas and reception through the thoroughfare, the clerestory window to the commons draws the eye up to the mature ring of trees bordering Montgomery Avenue.

The junior classrooms are conceived as a mixed model between open plan and traditional directional classroom teaching, with dedicated teaching spaces connected to the commons and direct access to outdoor learning and play. The classrooms are adaptive to allow for a multitude of configurations to support a range of teaching modes, independent study or group discussion, with interactive TVs supplementing physical media for art, math games, and literacy skills.