Inner Sydney High School

The Project

Inner Sydney High School is one of Australia's most ambitious school buildings, an 11-storey vertical high school designed by FJMT on Chalmers Street, Surry Hills, integrating a contemporary tower with a cluster of 19th-century heritage sandstone and brick buildings on the edge of Prince Alfred Park. The school delivers 47 teaching spaces, five floors of STEM facilities, science labs, food technology, music and visual arts rooms, indoor and outdoor sports facilities including a rooftop sports court, and shared use of the adjacent park. It opened in January 2021.

The Challenge

There was no precedent for this project in NSW public education. The brief called for a comprehensive high school on an extremely constrained heritage site in one of Sydney's densest inner-city areas, with none of the sprawling suburban footprint a school of this scale would typically rely on. The answer was to go vertical, stacking contemporary teaching spaces above and alongside heritage buildings. But finding a contractor with the capability, experience, and financial capacity to deliver something this technically complex, spanning large-scale new construction and sensitive heritage conservation, required a rigorous and carefully structured market approach.

My Approach

I was engaged by Schools Infrastructure NSW to prepare the contractor tender package and manage the market selection process. My job was to determine the right contract structure, assemble the tender documentation, and run the procurement process that would identify builders genuinely capable of delivering the project. FJMT's design, with its patterned aluminium tower facade and careful integration of heritage fabric, demanded a contractor who could demonstrate proven capability across both contemporary high-rise construction and heritage conservation. The process resulted in Hansen Yuncken's appointment.

The Outcome

The completed school opened in January 2021 and immediately became a landmark on the Surry Hills skyline, its silver aluminium facade etched with a leaf pattern, visible from across the inner city. The restored heritage buildings create a striking contrast with the tower, and the vertical organisation, rooftop sports court, shared parkland, STEM-focused floor plates, has set a new benchmark for high-density urban school design in Australia. Working on a project of this significance early in my career gave me a deep appreciation for the role procurement plays in enabling great architecture. Getting the right builder at the table is where project quality begins, and that is a principle I carry into every engagement at Yaxley Studio.