The premise for architectural design for ages has been form follows function. This means that the form that a building takes will often be heavily influenced by the core functions of the spaces within the building. However, over-reliance on this premise inclines students to take a bare minimum functionalist approach; often without exploring innovative aesthetics, concepts and designs.
Case studies on incredible and award-winning buildings featuring innovative design concepts enable the student to get new ideas on how to approach architectural design. The benefits of doing a case study on innovative designs include:
This report will study some of the innovative architecture present in Melbourne including the Chau Chak building, Science building, Swanston building, Melbourne design school and the Design Hub Melbourne. The analysis will include striking features of each architectural building that can be adopted in the students’ design.
The Chau Chak building is one of the Australian first building to be designed by the celebrated modernist architect Frank Gehry. The building is located in Haymarket precinct, City Campus and is within the ‘cultural ribbon’ that extends from the UTS to the Sydney Opera House that also includes the Good Line development and the Darling harbor.
The design concept was a cluster of tree houses.
The Chau Chak building challenges the traditional idea of the context. The building form can fit in an urban, local, rural, virtual or global context. It stands out as a building that strikingly captures the eyes of passers-by, which is a great accomplishment in itself considering other striking architectural landmarks that are located within the building’s vicinity.
The east facing facades feature a fluid brick façade that celebrates the sandstone heritage of Sydney while the west facing facades feature angular glass shards that fit in with the contemporary surrounding structures.
The construction of the building challenges construction norms; the standard construction method using brick veneer has been altered to achieve a seamless fluid form with a smooth texture finish. The brick envelope has been tied into the structural system of the building. Each of the bricks was custom made for the building and hand-laid during construction.
The resultant building form has been a memorable fluid landmark for Sydney. It has also been lauded as the inaugural buildings forming architectural imagery due to the expressive brickwork.
The interior spaces were designed adopting the new education model for UTS that required increased one-on-one interactions and direct communication between users. The resultant design developed by Gehry embraced face to face interactions, personalized learning and online learning.
The resultant design features oval-shaped spaces that allow a sizeable number of users per session. In addition, the building contains numerous informal spaces within the circulation space that are easily accessible from the food courts that are well ventilated and contain lots of natural lighting. In addition, the design enables more interaction between the students and the lecturers within the adequately spaced circulation paths.
The Science and Graduate building (also known as building seven) is located in the City Campus for UTS.
The entire concept of the building follows an organic form which can be seen in the exterior envelope, the shape of the atrium, spiral staircase and the lighting fixtures. The building is a spectacular example of a building that was inspired by its organic concept down to the details.
The exterior has an organic undulating facades that are accentuated by contrasting rectangular glass windows.
The main circulation feature of the building is the spiral staircase that is accentuated by an above skylight. The resulting shape allows beautiful natural lighting from above. In addition, it is cladded with pastel tiles that give the space a warm and welcoming aura for all its users.
The lighting fixtures within the green auditorium have been designed following a conical flask shape. These lighting fixtures provide vibrant green colour that amplify the green colour and ambience of the auditorium.
The base color chosen for the entire design was green. The colour has been linked to calmed environment necessary for learning and creativity. The color is present in the exterior facades, the interior learning spaces and the green auditorium.
The Swanston academic building (SAB) was designed for the RMIT University’s College of Business. It is located within the university’s urban campus along Swanston Street. The RMIT urban campus has been described as a ‘city within a city’. This building has been lauded for its contemporary approach to educational architecture, bold use of colours, use of the latest technology fittings and sustainability.
The entire building is accentuated with bold colors that are not often featured in commercial or education architecture. The exteriors facades are made up of jagged edges that are folded and curved, that feature yellow, grey and blue accent panels.
Bold geometric shapes can be seen throughout the building from the shapes of the exterior panels, the luminaires of the light fittings in the interior and the shape of the furniture.
Lecture hall with striking geometry features and colors
Due to space constraints, the design was envisioned on the idea of a ‘vertical campus’, that is, vertically stacked informal open spaces that are connected to the central circulation system, This concept enables a three-dimensional student infrastructure in the building.
The building contains double-volume lobbies that function as social spaces. These lobbies act as informal learning centers for the individual learning and group discussions and also function as focal points for each floor. These lobbies are washed by adequate natural light and ventilation and contain variety of furniture that makes the space vibrant.
The windows follow a distinctive triangular design that provides maximum views and optimum environmental performance. There are three windows per level, each of which offers three particular views; straight out, down and up. The sunshades for the windows are also triangular in design and are lightweight. Thus the entire façade has decreased solar heat gains, allows for adequate natural lighting and ventilation into the space and offers spectacular views.
The design hub aim is to offer a space for various fields of work that involve design research and post graduate education. Among those housed are architecture, aeronautical engineering, industrial design, landscape architecture and urban design. The design hub is impressive not only in terms of aesthetics and its apparent clean and simple design but also in its functionality. This can be clearly seen from the exterior of the building to the least of spaces found in the interior and circulation spaces.
For one the design hub exterior façade hasn’t just been designed to be aesthetically appealing. It does more than being a cover of the interior spaces as it’s specially designed to offer automated sun shading, evaporative cooling and fresh air intake for a desirable human environment. Even more interesting is the fact that they can be
The structures flexibility and adaptability nature is not only observed on the exterior as it has been emphasised more in the interior spaces. The spaces are designed to foster adaptability in the way that it is used. The users can easily fine tune their provided space to suit the functions. This is important since the users are of different fields of study that are housed for not a long period of time and as such this ensures maximum utilization of the spaces available simply because of the fact that current users can always manipulate the spaces to suit their requirements.
Also the spaces within have been created to offer transparency and emphasize on interaction between the uses regardless of whether they belong to the same field of study.
This not only fosters socialization and networking but also development and unity through cooperation and sharing of ideas. Such a design is bound to bring about a positive change in the way the users think and act especially because they are in an environment that pushes for interaction. Although such an environment is bound to have its fair share of negative effects, the positive outweigh the negative.
This structure houses the architects, urban planners, landscape architects, ecologists and builders among others. This building was designed with the idea of pedagogy and broader studio environment as these fields of study in such a type of environment. Its true to say the the building has been designed for visibility and engagement on the part of users especially the students.
The design of the structure has been done in way that its spatial allocation and configurations, programmatic adjacencies and relationships foster a rich learning environment which pushes for creativity and resourceful design research. The building has many inventive structural and environmental ideas that have made it grow into a live learning tool for both the students and staff at large. For instance the outstanding impressive atrium offers spectacular visual and physical interconnection between students and the staff.
The open permeable ground plane and the transparent facades expose the creative and cooperative undertakings to the rest of the campus.
The environment created as a result of spatial organization ,transparency and the various inventive spaces that were created as a result of creative planning by the designers pushes for interactive studying that’s is not only good for performance but also the real world. Some of the styles such as exposing materials and structures engage the users to insight into the minds of those whore involved in designing and the construction procedures.
The design of this building also incorporates sustainability features.it notifies the users of its environmental performance, allows testing of developing technologies, tracks energy consumption making the practice of sustainable research into daily experience and learning.
The building offers a flexible environment where one can think, design, draw experiment and prototype. This doesn’t have to happen in classrooms coz with the changing times its true to say that technology plays a big a big part and the conversations that take place in different places are important. The building has been able to offer circulation spaces where one can sit or have constructive conversations.
Conclusion
Architects have used art in their designs as a visual language and as a form of communication such as Chau Chak UTS building to resemble a cluster of tree houses. The social function demonstrated in the art can be interpreted by viewers to give different meaning deeply rooted in their culture and community. Our responsibility as future architects lies in transforming the built environment by borrowing inferences that mirror our communities and cultural practices, combining these ideas to come up with a concept that relates to the community and interacting with the site to achieve uniformity and sustainable design.
The architectural designs such as the Science building UTS, the Swanston building RMIT, and RMIT design hub are not only intricate in their utter simplicity, but they are also breathtaking in how they exemplify merit demystifying the myth that excellent ought to be expensive and farfetched. The designs achieve illustrations of how and simple form can be fine-tuned into an aesthetically iconic structure that standout among the rest while taking the all-important strides in modern technological advancements in tune with the rest of the world.
References
Calzini, Jennifer. “Dr Chau Chak Wing Building.” Gentry Partners Bolsters UTS 104 no. 2 (2015): 24-33.
Engberg, Juliana. “RMIT Design Hub.” Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 102 no. 2 (2013): 18-28.
kaji-O’Grady, Sandra. “Melbourne School of Design.” Architecture Australia 104 no. 1 (2015): 22-32.
Neustein, David. “UTS Science and Health Building.” School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney 104 no. 3 (2015): 14-22.
Smith, Des. “The Complex: The Swanston Academic Building by Lyons offers architectural complexity without contradiction.” Deakin University 101 no. 5 (2012): 28-36.
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