Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2016 i Architecture Australia

I recently participated in a three-hour walking tour of Tonsley in South Australia. Tonsley has been described as “Australia’s first innovation district” and it covers an expansive sixty-one hectares, which will eventually accommodate educational, commercial, light industry, retail, community, residential and recreation spaces. The project began in 2010, when the South Australian Government purchased the site in Clovelly Park, ten kilometres south of Adelaide’s CBD. It is now partially completed and occupied and is due to be finished in 2032. This stage of the project is a great time to visit, because it requires both hindsight and foresight to visualize the transformation, to understand the history of the place and to imagine future possibilities. The tour, organized by the Australian Institute of Architects as one of the fringe events for…

The university campuses of Australia could, simplistically, be placed into two categories. There are the traditional stone campuses of Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Adelaide Universities. Then there are the concrete city campuses, like RMIT University, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the Queensland University of Technology and the University of South Australia. The stone universities are often set outside or on the edge of the city centre in idyllic, park-like surroundings. They have enough space not to feel hemmed in and are a world within themselves. While not integrated into their semi-suburban context, they do not block access. In fact, they provide a picturesque commons of landscape gardens, courtyards and sporting fields with a backdrop of handsome buildings. In contrast the concrete city universities are tight and urban. They lack…

Travel approximately 1,700 kilometres north from my office in Brisbane and you reach the beginnings of the last third of the state of Queensland. Prior to entering Cairns you travel along the A1 Highway, squeezing between the state’s second highest mountain, Bellenden Ker, to the west and the Grey Peaks National Park to the east. This threshold leads you through an ever-widening valley to an outer southern suburb called White Rock, gripped by Trinity Inlet to the east and Mount Sheridan to the immediate west. The traditional owners of this stunning Country are the Mandingalbay Yidinji people. Located here is the new science building at Trinity Anglican School by Charles Wright Architects. In late 2015, I attended a lecture given by Charles Wright to the very active regional members of…

To work effectively, educational architecture has to respond to current thinking about teaching and learning, while at the same time planning for the shifts in approach that are likely to occur across the life of a project. The first stage of St Ambrose Primary School in Pottsville attempts to address this significant challenge by moving beyond the open-plan classroom. In its place, the school offers an impressive variety of carefully considered indoor and outdoor spaces for learning. Areas for individuals and small groups feature within the design as much as larger zones for gathering and collaboration. St Ambrose Primary School opened its doors to students at the beginning of the 2015 school year. Designed by local studio Pat Twohill Designs in association with Brisbane-based firm Twohill and James, the school…

University campuses have been identified as potentially important nodes for encouraging increased urban densities in Australian suburbs. Suburban university campuses are indeed full of activity and people, and it seems logical enough to think that with appropriate planning policies, infrastructural investment and urban design, this activity could leaven development around the node. At its heart, this would be development of housing and retail to support campus users, and of research-based businesses and institutions that can spin out of university enterprises. But development begets development, intensity of activity more intensity still. The hope is that – if the right levers were pulled in relation to transport infrastructure and encouragement of denser housing patterns – universities would be catalysts for consolidation in the suburbs. In Melbourne, there are a number of major…

There are many starting points when setting out to explore the current state of architectural education, as evidenced by a broad and expanding range of sources, references, opinions, concerns, manifestos, propositions, refutations and a sprinkling of objective assessments. The tumult of ideas, thoughts and critiques ranges over the value of education itself, the future of the profession of architecture and comparisons with other disciplines that, taken together, suggest a fervour of action and reaction, of future-focused innovation and enterprise. Not so. At the base of it all, at least here in Australia, there is a relatively settled set of expectations and educational practices in place, the residual outcome of years of battling to shore up the presence of the discipline of architecture within tertiary education – an arena beset by…

The delivery of education in our schools and universities is increasingly characterized by a focus on new modes of learning and engagement. The flipped classroom and blended, informal and online learning pepper contemporary educational briefs. Informal and flexible spatial arrangements, sticky space, expanded thresholds, high streets of learning, windowed lecture theatres and cafe/library hybrids now appear in many new educational buildings. Schools and universities promote the distinctive and enriching nature of the student experience they provide, a significant component of which is seen to reside in the attributes of their buildings and open spaces and the integration of progressive educational formats within these environments. Many of these transformations have contributed greatly to the improvement of our educational institutions. There is a threat, however, that in the desire to achieve the…

What can architecture offer to education, beyond simply providing functional spaces that address different pedagogical requirements? The great body of educational architecture produced by McBride Charles Ryan (MCR) in Victoria over the past twelve years has pushed the limits on what architecture can dish up within the education sector. Regardless of budget, each one of MCR’s educational buildings is bursting with ambition and has its own distinct character. These buildings question the nature of educational architecture: how might architecture spark conversation, prompt questions about the nature of knowledge itself, create a unique identity for a school and provide an inspiring, reputation-building public front that connects with the community and broader context? Unashamedly figurative, delightfully coloured and reminiscent of a children’s library, MCR’s educational buildings unveil a series of narratives that…

I believe it was Peter Cook who said that innovation in architecture often happens at the peripheries and is subsequently appropriated by the centre. I expect he was referring to the creative and provocative output of some young architects from Graz, Austria and Basel, Switzerland practising in the 1960s and 70s; quirky projects from the 1980s and 90s scattered throughout Los Angeles’s fringe suburbs of Santa Monica, Venice and Culver City; and his later enthusiasm for projects in Melbourne. For a few architects in Perth, it was, at the time, an appealing observation. Could the West contribute something of value? Let’s face it, this place was certainly on an edge, a long way from some centre, and today the tyranny of distance is still operative. A new project by JCY…

“We’ve used Geberit for years because they offer the best possible combination of design and functionality.” — LOUISE BELL, INTERNI Like many modern high-density residential buildings, the apartments in the new ADVANXeast development in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay are designed with a focus on the living areas – which makes sense, given the views of Sydney Harbour that so many of the apartments enjoy. The bathrooms in the apartments are, for the most part, long and narrow. This meant the project’s interior designer, Interni, needed to “maximize the sense of spaciousness in each by eliminating any clutter,” says director Louise Bell. For Bell, Geberit’s concealed in-wall cisterns with discreet flush plates were an obvious choice. “In-wall cisterns were the only way for us to achieve the streamlined design we wanted and…

An extension to a school and kindergarten in Singapore, by Australian architects Studio 505, takes place against a background of jubilation. Singapore celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2015 and much was made of the advancement of the country from a cluster of kampongs to a sophisticated city-state supporting the world’s third highest per capita GDP. It is a remarkable achievement for an island of 700 square kilometres with no natural resource other than its people. The founders (Lee Kuan Yew died just before the jubilee) placed much focus on education, bringing schools sponsored by clan associations, churches and the colonial powers under government control to ensure equity and access (there are no “private” schools) and investing in infrastructure and teacher training. The resulting system, along traditional British lines of O-levels…

A wave of school building was triggered in Queensland by the federal Building the Education Revolution (BER) program and the state government’s Flying Start program to support the transition of Year Seven students to secondary school. The BER initiative was widely criticized for wastefulness and not delivering “value,” yet was value clearly defined, other than regarding delivery? The BER Implementation Taskforce observed that Catholic and independent schools fared better than government schools with this funding because their masterplanning practices are typically active and their governance and management structures are strong. Arguably, in many of these contexts, a vigorous emphasis is placed on vision and values, cultural practices and agendas for transformation. Discussed here are three works by M3architecture within three distinct independent school settings that exemplify positive interactions between values-based…