St Francis Xavier College and St Catherine’s Catholic Primary School share a campus on busy Clyde Road in Berwick, in Melbourne’s outer south-east. The schools’ new chapel, the Our Lady of the Southern Cross Chapel by Branch Studio Architects, is a duck in a landscape of decorated sheds. Zagame’s, Hungry Jack’s, Kmart, Shell and Aldi sprawl along the highway, their signs vying for motorists’ attention at the road’s edge. Ducks, by their nature, need no such announcement. This new addition looks like a chapel: its shape is foretelling of the activities that go on inside it. But in its own way, it does participate in the “big sign, little building” roadside banter through the inclusion of a ten-metre-high cross tower, which, while expressed as part of a family of rammed…