The new Student Precinct at the University of Melbourne has transformed the on-campus student experience by delivering a collection of sophisticated indoor and outdoor spaces that meet the needs of a diverse student body.
The precinct is both a major entrance to the university campus and the connective tissue between public transport nodes and nine new and refurbished buildings. By designing in relation to the existing heritage buildings and landscapes that flank the precinct, the history of the university is sharpened and brought into focus. The result is a vibrant center of activity that co-locates student services and activities closer to the new heart of the campus.
The scale of the project marks a once-in-a-generation campus investment for the University of Melbourne, replacing cloistered, unfriendly buildings, courtyards and streets with expansive new indoor and outdoor spaces for students to come together, learn and connect.
The key aim of the project was to enhance and expand the student experience through reconciliation, diversity, inclusion, activation and connection. A concurrent focus was on scalability: throughout the seven new and refurbished buildings and the 12,000m2 landscape can be reconfigured and adapted, allowing for its general, everyday use, as well as accommodating events as large as major festivals.
True co-creation
The Student Precinct is the first fully co-created major project in the university’s 169-year history. This means that the voice of the student community has been at the centre of the project’s design and development, with more than 20,000 students and staff actively contributing their views, ideas and expertise to inform the planning and design process. The design team was assembled in response to this process and comprises a culturally diverse and expertise-driven team capable of successfully responding to Indigenous knowledge, the design heritage existing buildings on site, as well as a range of uses, from retail environments to performing arts.
An over-arching cultural narrative has underpinned the design thinking of the project. Through oral history, research, and a strong dialogue with representatives of the Kulin Nation, a narrative that seeks to make the invisible, and to recover lost stories and landscapes, has been used to anchor a Connection to Country. Key to this is the story of the eel migration that occurs within the stormwater system below the campus, which has been narrativized to become a key driver in reasserting a water story that flavours the overall design, revealing an Indigenous narrative and at the same time bringing water to the surface and supporting a broader water strategy.
Embodying narrative
The new terrain and landscape of the Student Precinct have become the primary public space of the Parkville campus. Each element of the landscape embodies the narrative thinking and co-creation processes described above.
For instance, the paths that form the backbone of the new public realm deviate from the colonial street grid that defines Melbourne, instead faking routes that follow the natural contours of the site’s topography.
Rediscovering and reconnecting with the “lost” ground was physically enabled by the removal of multiple decked surfaces of that previously dominated the site. Though the original watercourse of Bouverie Creek had long since been submerged, its environmental and cultural histories became a further device for reinstating deeper links with place, and for practical measures of wayfinding and water management. Its path is traced by the north-south path that bisects the site, paved in local mudstone.
Sustainability
A central part of our sustainability strategy was to create a wide range of microclimates within the precinct at any one time through the arrangement of built form and landscape. The Urban Heat Island effect is reduced through increasing shading and reducing heat absorbing paved surfaces. A number of landscape targets were developed that guided the project, these included tree canopy cover (40%), maximised use of unsealed soil (a challenge, given the urban nature of the program), increased biodiversity and WSUD.
Other landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape:
GLAS Landscape Architects
Architecture offices involved in the design:
Lyons, Koning Eizenberg Architecture, NMBW Architecture Studio, Greenaway + Greenshoot and Architects EAT
Location: University of Melbourne, 761 Swanston St, Parkville VIC 3052
Design year: 2017
Year Completed: 2023
