Building for what’s next
The Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) is a facility for high-performing senior secondary students, designed to bridge the gap between school and university. Built in Melbourne’s South Yarra for the Victorian School Building Authority, CHES delivers on a bold pedagogical brief: create a place that feels rigorous, open-ended, and future-facing.
For us, it was also a technical challenge. A narrow block. A complex easement. High-voltage lines running the street frontage. And a structure that had to carry architectural intent, while negotiating a high-rise directly on the title boundary.
The kind of job that doesn’t offer shortcuts—just steady progress, and the need to think clearly at every step.
Light, structure, and clarity
The heart of the design is a full-height atrium—a vertical volume that draws daylight deep into the footprint, enabling every level to breathe. A Raico hybrid timber-aluminium glazing system wraps the internal façade, lined with Victorian Ash. Above, an ETFE roof system—lightweight, double-skin, and imported from Germany—delivers thermal control and diffused natural light without overloading the structure.
It’s not decorative. It’s deliberate. On a site like this, light is structural too.
A material education
CHES isn’t finished in a traditional sense. Much is left visible on purpose—timber columns, concrete slabs, galvanised ductwork, electrical runs, and fixing systems. Students don’t just use the building; they learn from how it’s made.
The structural system balances laminated timber with concrete to reduce embodied carbon. Compressed fibre-cement wall panels and Woodwool ceilings add acoustic warmth. Floor finishes shift in tone from level to level, creating subtle visual cues to aid orientation.
It’s an environment that respects detail—down to the way light lands on a handrail or the shift in underfoot texture between teaching and breakout zones.
Anchored in site, open to the street
The ground level sets the tone. A generous lobby opens into a reception, café, and shared student hub, connecting CHES with its public interface on Chapel Street. A 275-seat auditorium—equipped for lectures, assemblies, and community use—opens onto a west-facing terrace that links directly to the adjacent Melbourne High School.
Externally, the pre-cast concrete façade is softened with integrated planting, giving the building a presence that’s civic without being performative. Views out are framed by greenery. Views in are partial—just enough to suggest the activity within, not reduce it to display.
Designed to adapt
Each learning space is positioned around the central void, ensuring equal access to light, air, and outlook—whether across the atrium or toward the street and terrace. State-of-the-art AV systems enable hybrid and remote learning across the state. Breakout nooks and transition spaces are treated with the same care as classrooms, enabling students to move between focus and rest with ease.
Up top, a roof terrace offers outdoor learning and teacher breakout space, shaded by a solar-panel pergola feeding energy back into the building.
Across every level, CHES was built to accommodate learning modes that haven’t been invented yet. Its systems are future-proofed. Its logic is legible. Its finish is robust without being severe.
Built to endure
There’s no flourish here for flourish’s sake. No detail that doesn’t carry weight.
CHES is a building that supports the work of education without distracting from it. And for us, that’s the real reward: turning a complex site and a high-spec brief into something that feels resolved, lasting, and quietly ambitious.
We’re proud to have built it.
