Deakin University School of Architecture and Built Environment /A+B
Deakin University is an Australian public university with campuses and learning centres throughout Victoria, Australia. The School of Architecture and Built Environment occupies a significant heritage building - a former woolshed - situated in a pivotal location on the waterfront in Geelong, a port city situated 75 kilometres south-west of Melbourne. The building's layout had been compromised over the years via a series of adaptations and its floorplan no longer aligned with the school’s pedagogic and research direction. The solution lay in a judicious use of resources; more editing rather than adding. This uncovered the most valued aspects of the original woolsheds – beams, skylights, columns – and met the school’s aspiration for a more open arrangement and recalibration of character towards one of “inclusiveness, friendliness, and graciousness”. Key functional relationships between accommodation areas were redefined, increasing the number of staff work areas by adopting an open plan approach to reflect the school’s teaching focused and student centred approach.
In the context of other Schools of Architecture recently completed in Melbourne, Deakin responds to the need for flexibility in educational spaces in a way that is structured without being prescriptive.
The brief was to change from the highly cellular existing configuration of academic, teaching and research spaces to fit the shift in the school’s direction towards a more integrated arrangement of these activities.
The design intent involved using largely what’s found in the existing conditions and, through a process of edits, primarily the removal of north-south walls, achieving a grain of transparency in an east-west direction. These walls were replaced with open framed shelving, partitions and windows. This set up a privacy gradient from west to east where the school now has greater connection to the public interface of the atrium. The school's workings are evident, this constitutes its identity.
Robust and unprecious, the spaces are capable of being appropriated in multiple ways with exhibition/pin-up as foundational to the school’s culture.
The anxiety held by staff of moving from individual offices to more open plan was alleviated by providing a variety of scale in the resultant work areas – more intimate, more open, more quiet, more collective. People choose their spot.
Other obligations included managing user groups, the staff and students, and the property services group representing university policy. This extended also to the previous architects McGlashan Everist and the integrity of what had gone before and of course to the bones of the original historic fabric of the woolstore.
