University of Melbourne Student Precinct

The University of Melbourne’s Student Precinct in Victoria, Australia, aims to achieve an enhanced student experience through strategies of reconciliation, diversity, inclusion, and connection, with embedded scalability from festival to everyday ‘chill-out’ modes. The site represents a new centre of the extensive Parkville campus, encompassing six new and refurbished buildings, including 24,000m2 of student oriented spaces, within a 12,000m2 landscape. A collaborative design team was curated to respond to the complexities of the brief; inclusive of a new major performing arts centre, a library (and non-library), indigenous support centre, extensive new retail, student services, union offices, and multiple event spaces, all surrounded by student orientated spaces. As part of a comprehensive Indigenous Australians engagement strategy, over 45 First Nations language groups were consulted to ensure that the design of the Student Precinct was informed by their voices. This cultural understanding embraces a concept of ‘Reconciliation at Scale’, and as a signature project of the University’s Elevate RAP, is tangibly activated within the built fabric. Captured student perspectives, through an extensive co-creation process, are infused into the raw materiality of the precinct that encourages student ownership and occupation. The careful regeneration of existing 19C/20C buildings, creates an inclusive and porous precinct that embeds cultural and heritage connections at the heart of student experience. A responsive series of sustainability strategies around water, urban shade and energy enhance this offering and have resulted in 6-star ratings for new buildings and a new longevity in heritage ones. The primary urban design move of the Precinct is removal of an elevated concrete plaza covering the central area, reinstated by a new version of ‘solid ground’, both restoring the settings of original heritage buildings and embedding them in a new Indigenous-led conception of place. Underlying this is a ‘Welcome Terrain’ - a network of connective gathering spaces paved in a patchwork of local stone that signify reconnection with the ‘lost’ ground - and inclusion of a water story narrative from the pre-colonial waterway through the site. The core program of the Precinct is generally elevated above the ground plane, enhancing porosity and biophilic outlooks for students. This is evident along the new Monash Rd frontage featuring new Arts and Cultural and Student Pavilion buildings, where active and protected ground frontages face out to key campus entries. Both new and refurbished buildings host external balconies across the lower floors that surround activity in the Amphitheatre, whilst internal spaces are dual-purpose and flip from informal, to ‘active’ event modes, maximising their utility over the year.