Melbourne, Australia

The Sphere and the Labyrinth

The new building for the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning is a potent manifestation of a new student culture at the University of Melbourne. Emblematic of the recently implemented ‘Growing Esteem’ strategy and promoting the aspirations of the Melbourne Model, the new ABP is a public-spirited and internationally engaged institution in which a variety of spaces act as a mnemonic to students, rich with the possibility for spatial articulation and experience.

The multiple varieties of space evident within the new ABP promote a sense of identity and belonging among its population of students, academics and support staff, resonating across cultures and through history while highlighting the role of the experiential in the creative act. Students, staff and academics appropriate their environment to their immediate ends, negotiating and respecting the interfaces between groups in a fundamental and fluid restructuring of what architectural pedagogy can be.

Teaching in the new ABP is a public act. Pedestrians pass through the building along a journey that is both informative and memorable. The building is cleaved by a beautiful canyon; a sectional cut that ‘reveals’ the act of learning in progress and exhibits the products of architectural endeavour in curated displays.

The canyon is the building’s lungs; its thermal chimneys naturally ventilate the main volume, while the passage of storm water is celebrated internally along its path to a visible cistern in the building’s basement. A thermal labyrinth consisting of the demolished fabric of the old ABP stored in gabion walls is located in the building’s basement. Here, the university’s tradition of beautiful and mystical underworlds is extended. Together, the cistern and the labyrinth temper the building’s internal air environment. When it rains, it quite literally pours.

This is an urban building, a miniature of Rome, Venice, or even Melbourne. The richness of its density offers a site of engagement and chance encounter, a mixing zone for staff and students, a respite from more intense adjacent workplaces and a place to exchange ideas.

A key planning principle is to ensure adjacencies. The ‘new studio’ requires equal access to workshops (action), printing (output) and library resources (reflection). Design studios, research higher degree and academic workspaces, as well as workshops and libraries are extruded vertically through the building to maximise their adjacencies on each level. Special places, such as the exhibition rooms, lecture theatres and Japanese room are distributed elsewhere throughout the building’s volume while research studios are positioned adjacent to the public stair. A fine balance is pursued to provide for the needs of senior academics for reflective, private space, while simultaneously blurring boundaries and hierarchy, particularly in the MSD.

In devising an ordering principle, we considered the integration of fractal and self-similar patterning. Our investigations suggested an affinity with the Gothic, and the closer we looked at the Gothic and its revival, the more we desired its complex beauty. We traced the rose windows of Chartres, Vezelay, Amiens and more, and felt the urge for a contemporary pattern; a new order representing fundamental restructure. An aperiodic fractal pattern compelled us, and as we only had a fragment, we pulled a few favours for a script to fill the missing links. This pattern is engaging. Symmetry appears and evaporates with alluring fascination.

We used the pattern as an ordering system – a neo-neo-gothic, if you will. Endlessly adaptable, we used it to carve the canyon, create discrete places, shape spaces, and form objects and furniture. The crenellated subtraction reflects light, rendering the public space of the canyon with sharpness and shadow.

The pattern is further used to order the external expression of the ABP. Conceptually, the expression of the Northern facade is glazed and rational – in architectural parlance, it is ‘nuts and bolts’. The Eastern and Western facades, in comparison, are stately and responsive to their immediate adjacencies, while the Southern façade is complex and effusive – a giant lantern and spherical absence, whose illumination speaks of the nocturnal behaviour of architecture students, especially toward semester’s end.

Everyone knows how hard they do it. Such passion is to be celebrated.

Project Team: Robert McBride, Debbie Lyn Ryan, Drew Williamson, Luke Waldron, Farzin Lofti-Jam, Michelle James, Daniel Griffin, Andrew Hayne, Alan Ting, Amelia Borg, Natasha Maben, Qianyi Lim, Stephan Bekhor, Ben Josef, Angela Woda, Fairley Batch, Cathryn Panettieri, Kirilly Barnett, David Fraser, Marie Chen

Europaconcorsi Beta

The Sphere and the Labyrinth