From the Chancellery
By Professor Mads Gaardboe
Head of School, Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design
An architectural revolution has arrived at UniSA’s City West campus.
Three intruders clad in large sheets of glass and white concrete panels have challenged the striking uniformity of yellow, red and blue buildings. The former preference for an external corporate image and internal flexible use is now merged with a new attitude to the design of academic buildings.
The users matter. The South Australian School of Art needs highly specialised spaces in which to create photography, painting, glass, ceramics, sculpture, jewellery, textiles and more, all requiring particular lighting, acoustics, ventilation, wet and dry areas and other special design aspects.
It goes without saying that functionality is expected, but the real challenge for the architect to design an environment that stimulates curiosity and creativity is in clear evidence.
The Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design relies on design studios. Traditionally considered by students as their second home, they are not only spaces in which they receive instruction or meet their tutor, but where they work in a professional sense. Here they draw, make models, read or write, often at hours far beyond the regular teaching timetable.
Even within an international context, few schools can boast a workshop better than the one located on the ground floor of the Dorrit Black Building, allowing architecture, interior architecture and industrial design students to transform their ideas from sheets of paper or computer screens to full scale objects. Already a feature of design education at UniSA, here theory can be brought to the ultimate test.
For the public, a large new gallery in the Kaurna Building will be the focus for many future exhibitions, and the student cafč/bar will ensure that the surrounding passages will be anything but empty open space. And from its years in hiding at City East, the Australian Architectural Archives will finally be accessible as a national resource for researchers, scholars and professionals.
Staff will also feel the change. The move from individual boxes along endless corridors in Yungondi to open plan offices is a controversial decision that has seen pros and cons extensively debated during the years of consultation between users, the University’s Property Group and the designers.
A young Melbourne architect, John Wardle, was selected to do the designs of the two academic buildings and the library extension at City West. A good investment it seems, since Wardle’s reputation has continued to soar ever since. Wardle’s practice was backed up by the Adelaide office of mega-sized international architects Hassell.
In the tight urban fabric of the campus, Wardle’s buildings slot into the established grid, but in their third dimension, add an entirely new level of richness and surprise. Slits and voids do not automatically follow floors, while outcrops and jagged profiles extend dramatically against the sky.
The surprises – visible from the streets below – continue inside.
“It is a building explained,” says Wardle, and by this he means that many spaces, structures and services that usually are enclosed, are here exposed through cut-outs in floors and ceilings and punched openings in walls.
Layers upon layers of surfaces and space invite curiosity and anticipation, and as such, the buildings themselves will be a constant reminder for UniSA’s art, architecture and design students of the need to be aware.