Architect Enrico Taglietti with Flynn students, parents and teachers

Dr Taglietti has is regarded as an ‘elder statesman’ of the architectural profession in Canberra. He has an impressive record of spectacular public and private buildings in a career more than spanning five decades. In 2007, the Architects Institute of Australia responded by awarding him the Gold Medal, the highest award for Australian architects.[¹]

Dr Taglietti’s long association with Flynn began in 1971, with a brief to “… introduce into the ACT a new approach to school design, which will provide a flexibility of space, equipment and furniture not previously available in the traditional school.”

It was a brief he embraced with enthusiam, taking the building through several redesigns, before settling on the current form as the ACT’s first purpose-designed open-plan school. The school opened in 1974, and a Taglietti-designed kindergarten unit and community room were added in 1976.

In normal circumstances, an architect’s work might have stopped there, but not for Flynn. It was just the start of Dr Taglietti’s involvement with the Flynn community as he watched his design create the environment in which a community has been able to develop from a school building.

Dr Taglietti was a welcome visitor at the school while it was open, sharing his vision of learning and architecture with generations of enthusiastic, young children, greeting him with ‘buon giorno’, thanks to the school’s Italian program.

After a fire in one wing in 1994, the Flynn community asked that Dr Taglietti be appointed for the reconstruction, which became the community resource centre. He also worked with the Flynn community to protect the school in its setting and later sought to have it heritage listed after the school was closed in 2006.

Dr Taglietti obviously enjoyed seeing his creation fulfil its purpose so well, leading him to identify Flynn as one of his “most important works”.[²] This is a high accolade from such a highly regarded architect.

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