The Noosa Flexible Learning Centre by Bligh Tanner Consulting Engineers, Fulton Trotter Architects and InSiteEMLA for Edmund Rice Education offers a welcoming and distinctly non-institutional learning environment for disenfranchised youth in Noosa.
The project's stormwater strategy uses low-impact design approaches to mimic the site's natural hydrology, thereby avoiding the need for any underground pipes or stormwater infrastructure. It is a great example of how good design can achieve better environmental outcomes at lower costs.
This project is important as it demonstrates that stormwater quality and hydrology can be managed in a way which exceeds best practice standards, while also reducing development costs.
Key initiatives:
- Maintaining ground-level permeability across 90 per cent of the site
- Developing approximately 1/3 of the site with buildings on raised piers (consistent with a Noosa beach-house feel) to preserve ground level infiltration characteristics, large areas of vegetation and shallow tree roots
- A carpark made of permeable pavement to avoid stormwater runoff
- Roofwater runoff captured in rainwater tanks
- A 20 per cent reduction of peak flows (based on a hydrological analysis)
- The overall water quality performance was analysed and found to exceed best practice load reductions for total suspended solids, total phosphorus and total nitrogen
- The use of lightweight, raised construction (in favour of slab-on-ground)
- Extensive roofwater capture and reuse
- Infiltration of surplus roofwater into soils beneath buildings
- Trafficable, permeable paving
- No underground stormwater pipes
- The site design mimics the natural hydrology of the site through avoiding ground-level impervious surfaces and capture and reuse of roofwater. Pre-and post development flow frequency curves are almost identical
Images: Fulton Trotter Architects
