Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities
The commitment to the environmental quality of university campuses is central to the modern contemporary tertiary experience and represents a growing multi-million dollar public investment in higher education infrastructure.
‘Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities’ (DP160100364)
The commitment to the environmental quality of university campuses is central to the modern contemporary tertiary experience and represents a growing multi-million dollar public investment in higher education infrastructure. In the post-world war 2 decades, campus development created unprecedented opportunities for experimental and influential planning, architectural and landscape design across Australia. Yet the origins of Australian campus design, its built legacies and challenges, have attracted little scholarly research.
This project, funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Dr Andrew Saniga of the University of Melbourne, addresses the lacuna in research around the origins and evolution of Australian campus design, its built legacies and challenges, and the evolving design strategies that help frame vital choices and challenges for the future. It explained the evolution of the modern campus in Australia from the Second World War to the current day. It examined how landscape architecture, planning, architecture, fine art, and urban design have contributed to the shape and form of Australian campuses. The outcomes shed light on the formative influences of the expansion era in campus-building encompassing political, institutional, social and cultural demands and extending to a detailed assessment of a selection of contemporary campuses.
Modern campuses in Australia represent some of the richest repositories of planning and design ideas. Their landscapes, architecture, planning, and artistic collections speak as much about how far the respective disciplines have evolved over the past 70 years as they represent some of the country's most valuable urban environments within practically every major city. The contributions that campuses make to the environmental quality of our cities is perhaps most strikingly revealed in the various CBDs where city campuses are leading urban and infrastructure transformations in terms of urban design, heritage and crucially, urban regeneration and renewal. The shape and form of suburban campuses, with their courts and open spaces along with modernist architecture and master planning, are today losing their citadel-like qualities and instead becoming catalysts for residential, hubs and precincts, and accompanying infrastructures and are consequently boosting suburban transformation.
The range of investigators represented landscape architecture, planning, architecture and cultural heritage. Across a range of themes these investigators collaborated to produce journal articles, conference papers, symposiums, workshops, digital platforms, media articles, and the book 'Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities' due to be published by UWA Press in 2022. These activities and publications have provided opportunities for comparing and contrasting historical emphases, particularly across architecture and landscape architectural fields and between landscape architecture and planning. Researching Australia's campuses encompassed an array of dimensions representative of the complexity of urban environments, and crucially, the need to foreground Indigenous cultural perspectives. Consequently, this project revealed the importance of developing further methodological and theoretical premises for similar research projects into the future.
For a list of publications, follow this link.
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The Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities publication is now available here. The book features chapter authors Robert Freestone, Philip Goad (ACAHUCH), Christine Garnaut, Hannah Lewi (ACAHUCH), Andrew Murray (ACAHUCH), Nicola Pullan and Andrew Saniga (ACAHUCH).