Farrell Wray Architects Build a Concrete Gallery Around a Tree They Refused to Touch.

Most architects get a brief. Farrell Wray Architects got a brief and a non-negotiable stakeholder: an existing gum tree standing between two buildings at Marcellin College in Bulleen, Victoria. Everything about their new flyover, right down to where the columns could physically go, was built around keeping it alive.

The 91-square-metre flyover connects the college’s senior learning building, built in 1963, to its junior school wing to the west, spanning an existing open-air walkway. A gum tree stands at the centre of the site, and the architects made it the whole point of the exercise. “The very first image we presented to the college was this tree circled with an ellipse,” say architects Ellie Farrell and Brad Wray, “which came to be completely serendipitous, to highlight it as the centre point to the project.”

That ellipse became the project’s organising logic—a rectilinear concrete container wrapped around an ellipsoid void, deliberately in tension with it.

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The architects point to minimalist artists Ellsworth Kelly, Ted Stamm and, especially, Robert Mangold as reference points, describing how Mangold’s work sets up “moments of tension and contrast with a formal geometric language vs its relationship to clear space.” A cranked internal wall splits the plan into a central thoroughfare and a quieter reflective space, where a circular skylight tracks the sun and frames a sightline to the school chapel.

None of it could compromise the tree. Before construction started, an arborist ran a full root scan, and the design had to bend around what it found. “We had to be flexible in where the four final column locations would be,” the architects explain. “Footings had to be dug by hand and the concrete slab above was designed essentially as a mass beam”—engineered specifically to let the column positions shift without damaging the root system, and to keep the tree, quite literally, standing.

The primary facade nods to the school’s namesake, St Marcellin Champagnat, referencing the hand-carved stone linkway at his Hermitage in France—right down to two deliberately unequal archways, chamfered edges that read as carved rather than cast, and a bladed GRC colonnade running across a sloping base line. It’s a quiet piece of institutional storytelling, references that are “abstracted and not initially obvious—revealing themselves through time and through story”.

This isn’t Farrell Wray’s first flyover, either. The typology traces back to their 2013–2015 project for the same principal, Marco Di Cesare, at Caroline Chisholm College in Braybrook—a scheme that ended up on public billboards, in school publications and in architectural media internationally, and which the practice credits with boosting enrolments and giving that community a real sense of pride. Building a second flyover for the same principal, a decade on, says something about how well that first one landed.

Since opening to students this year, the gallery’s art boxes are already doing their job, with the school’s art department using them to display student work. Students can sit on the long bench seat, reach out to touch the tree, and look up into its canopy—exactly the relationship the architects set out to build, and one no amount of clever geometry could have faked.

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[Images courtesy of Farrell Wray Architects. Photography by Peter Clarke.]