Rhythm and Flow

Rhythm & Flow runs through the fabric of Yanchep Secondary College as a set of integrated artworks: rippling custom brick walls, undulating louvred shade screens and printed glass windbreaks, together giving a new school on the northern coastal plain a language drawn from its own ground, the moving sand and water of the Yanchep coast.

The brick walls carry the pattern at its most tactile. Two large feature walls were built from a family of five brick shapes developed for the project, each custom profile requiring its own extrusion die, made in partnership with WA manufacturer Brikmakers. An algorithm developed in Grasshopper, using an image sampler, translated a source wave image into the placement of every brick: 2,760 bricks per wall, laid across eighty courses, each shape stepping forward or back to build a diagonal rippling motif across the surface. The result reads like wind writing on sand, a dune face in fired clay, and because the pattern lives in relief rather than colour, it redraws itself in shadow every hour the sun moves.

Above, the same fluid geometry becomes the building's shading system. A repeating waveform was developed for the horizontal louvred screens, custom profiled, lasercut and powdercoated aluminium blades whose depths vary blade by blade, so that the flat plane of a functional shade screen swells into an undulating wave, a water ripple effect travelling the length of the elevation. Fabricated with Colt, the screens do the building's environmental work while performing its artwork: shade as swell.

At the double height bridged walkways on the western side of campus, printed graphics on toughened glass windbreak walls complete the set, banded blue imagery that tempers the coastal wind while washing the circulation spaces in the colours of moving water.

Developed parametrically in close collaboration with With_Architecture Studio, Rhythm & Flow folds its artwork budget into surfaces the school already needed: walls, shade, wind protection. It established both the value adding approach and the marine language that the college's Stage 2 artwork, Rhythm and Flow II, would later carry into the performing arts building, one rhythm, still flowing.