Situated on the corner of Armagh and Montreal streets, overlooking Cranmer Sq. this building was designed to be an educational facility specialising in heritage building trades - it provides large open workshops suitable for each trade with classrooms, a small library area and a cafe that faces the protected green space on the west of the site.

 

The form of the building was inspired by the surrounding trees and gothic architecture - being the old site for Christchurch Girls high - and references this in the colonade on the street edges of the building, with thicker and more simple structural members in the centre of the building, much like the branching of a tree. 

 

As the building nears the heritage cottage next to the site it decreases in volume, the curve this creates in the structure of the colonnade is represented in the floor plan of the building, to the same proportions.