The opening of the Gillian Moore Centre for Performing Arts at Pymble Ladies’ College created a new landmark on a campus that has been growing steadily since its foundation in 1916. The Centre, named after the school’s principal, completes a performing arts precinct, complementing the adjacent 13-year-old David Blackwell Music School.

“This is a landmark facility and a very significant undertaking for the school council. Inevitably that leads to a building that makes some form of statement,” comments PMDL’s Andrew Pender who worked on this project with design director David Morris, Martin Cumming and Bill Shipman.

Although the Centre comprises a foyer space, studios, two small rehearsal rooms and support spaces, the focus is on the 750-seat auditorium, large enough to accommodate the entire senior school cohort. “It’s the elephant in the room,” says Pender wryly. “You can’t hide a 750-seat theatre.”

The drum shape reduces acoustic reflections and creates a remarkably intimate performance space by minimising the distance between the stage and the back row, an important consideration for young performers.

The building is cut deep into a slope and links on three levels with the Music School. On the upper level, the Music School’s brick colonnades continue to the Centre’s entrance, albeit in a less formal style, giving precedence to the drum shape.

A second entrance, on the lower level, connects the Centre to the prep and junior school and allows transparency through the foyer to the quadrangle, the school’s social centre.

The logistics of designing and constructing such a building were enormous. The site was excavated to a depth of over seven metres. The bottom corner of the stage is about five metres below grade at one corner.

“It was a building designed from the middle down and the middle up,” says Pender. “Building it from the bottom up made it really quite difficult to get it out of the ground.” Add to that equation, raked floors and the three-level connection to the Music School, not to mention construction taking place in the heart of an operating school.