Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Education Minister and Member for McConnel, Grace Grace joined Hutchinson Builders Chairman Scott Hutchinson and key project partners to celebrate the kick-off of construction for Stage 1 of Inner City North State Secondary College.

Located on the corner of St Paul’s Terrace and Brookes Street, at the site of the former Fortitude Valley State School, the college will be the first new inner city state high school in Brisbane to be built in over 50 years. As part of the Queensland Government’s $800 million Building Future Schools Fund, the school will be a flagship, future-focused educational facility, architecturally designed by Cox to sympathetically integrate with its inner urban surrounds. The elegant building will have both traditional classrooms and contemporary workshop and collaborative spaces over a number of levels.

The college will maximise available space on the compact inner city footprint, with a vertical design that provides a range of flexible learning environments over seven storeys. The innovative approach will set a new benchmark for contemporary, urban schools in Queensland. Hutchies is also building a new vertical school building at North Lakes State College with the Department of Education.

Hutchies’ Managing Director, Greg Quinn, is passionate about education projects being more than just bricks and mortar to the company. “As an organisation we’re all about building capacity and lifelong learning”, he said. “We have our own enterprise training organisation to offer our people opportunities for professional growth, and it’s great to think that we can contribute to developing the great minds of the future through projects like this one”.

Hutchies is pleased to be collaborating with two of our long time architectural partners, Cox for client advisory, and ThomsonAdsett, for our design documentation. Construction will be coordinated by the Department of Education’s selected project manager, Donald Cant Watts Corke.

Stage one of the development — the performing arts centre, sports centre, and main vertical building — will be delivered by Hutchies in three separable portions. There are provisions for a future second stage, and once complete, the school will be able to cater for up to 1,500 students.

Project Director Mitch Grimmer is looking forward to the challenge of building Queensland’s first vertical school. “I’ve worked on a number of school projects with Hutchies, including the North Lakes Secondary College job”, he said. “I think the benefit of that experience will bring enormous value to this project”.

The new secondary school will provide additional capacity for the growing communities in Brisbane’s rejuvenated city fringe suburbs like Bowen Hills, Fortitude Valley, Newstead and Teneriffe. The new school will partner with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to provide innovative pathways and outstanding career opportunities for young Queenslanders.

During construction, the project will directly employ around 300 people, and generate additional indirect economic benefits to surrounding businesses and the community.