Melbourne, Australia

Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne

John Wardle Architects and Office dA have won an international competition to design a new landmark building for the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

This new facility for The University of Melbourne will accommodate students from the Bachelor of Environments and the Melbourne School of Design, staff from the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, and research projects in collaboration with other Faculties (Engineering, Land and Environments). The building will include dedicated spaces for research into sustainable precinct design and performance, along with studios, lecture theatres, a library, exhibition, and specialist workshop spaces.
Within the new building, the next generation of professionals – architects, urban planners, ecologists, public health specialists and environmental engineers – will learn how to work together to make cities, and centres of habitation generally, more sustainable. At the heart of this pedagogical objective is holistic decision making, which in turn relies upon broad interdisciplinary knowledge and the capacity to collaborate.

Taking up this theme, John Wardle Architects of Melbourne has paired with Office dA, a design practice from Boston, USA, to form a creative coalition for this project where each office will be equally responsible for the architectural design. Both practices are known for their respective contributions to formal innovation, the transformation of the building industry, and contributions to the discipline by way of material exploration. Given their area of focus, the two teams will work with the research led approach by the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning to bring an extraordinary rigour to the final design outcome. The original submission was selected out of 133 received from 15 countries. Six entrants were then selected to develop a conceptual response to the four key issues of the brief: Built Pedagogy, The Academic Environment, The Design Studio, and The Living Building. The responses by John Wardle Architects and Office dA to these four cornerstones of the brief were many and varied.

If the goal of teaching, for example, is to take intellectually complex matter, and re-present it in ways that demystify, reveal, and open it up to debate, then the architectural analogy is to devise strategies of ‘transparency’, revelation, and exposure. This can apply to activity, infrastructure, and methods of construction. To this end, John Wardle Architects and Office dA created explicit programmatic adjacencies in their competition scheme that opened up the visual, acoustic and experiential relationships between activities. The Living Building, and the issue of sustainability, will be at the centre of ongoing conversations about design, inhabitation, construction and performance for the new building. Environmental control systems will also be subject to ideas about revealing and exposure in a manner that treats the building itself as a learning tool and an ongoing research project. When complete, the building will serve as a hub for undergraduate and graduate education, enabling critical interdisciplinary exploration into issues of sustainability in built environments through its external structure and internal design. The building itself will be a laboratory for experimentation and research into how the built environment can respond to the most challenging issue of our time – climate change.

The Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Professor Tom Kvan, noted that the winning scheme showed a strong understanding of educational, environmental, and social issues in a design that would generate excitement for all staff and students. In an interview with Australian Design Review, Professor Kvan also said that: “The team demonstrated a deep understanding of the opportunities to engage in discussions about new construction technologies, about the way students learn in a space, about how this building could inform other inhabitants of the campus. They demonstrated a capacity to understand the many facets and opportunities that this project is going to offer to us.”

Europaconcorsi Beta

Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne