University of New South Wales (UNSW) Biological Sciences

The University of New South Wales Biological Sciences Building creates a vibrant environment serving as a collaborative space for on display research led teaching. The significant adaptive reuse strategies and built form facilitates connectivity within the greater Biological Sciences Precinct via careful planning and spatial arrangement. The building provides active social spaces, breaking down silos within departments. Encouraging both planned and unplanned interactions the design carefully balances efficient laboratory functions with aesthetically pleasing external expression As a public gateway to campus from a planned Health Precinct development on Botany Street, the new passageway along the North building is a welcoming and protected entrance, with visual connections into the teaching laboratories and classrooms, and a lobby that invites the curious into the building with a future café and visual displays. Once inside, the public is drawn deeper into the building by the activated atrium space, with more displays, views into teaching superlabs, and informal learning/collaboration settings. The totally refurbished North and new South buildings respond to adjacent existing laboratory buildings through mass, scale, colours, and floor to floor alignment with bridge connections, creating a truly linked precinct. Breaking the Botany Street facades, and recessing the ground floor and rooftop plant responded to the residential block opposite the site, although slated for future demolition, is not overwhelmed by the buildings in the meantime. The Reference design (by others) proposed a smaller new building adjacent to the North building, with inefficient horizontal and vertical circulation arrangements, providing two teaching/research groups two dedicated floors each. Because the South building represented the last available site within a dense precinct, Woods Bagot analysed the site and proposed to link the two buildings with an atrium and provide a larger, more efficient floor plate, reducing the building height by one floor whilst providing all briefed spaces. A second, selected option retained the original building height, providing an additional floor for the precinct. Though out design, the full design and construction team attended all workshops in an integrated design process, ensuring all understood the discussions, options and decisions that guided design. Results were a well-coordinated solution, providing optimal use of highly valuable space. The ECI design process enabled the design team and contractor to weigh the constructability, cost and schedule impact of all decisions, and assist the University in making choices that provide the best long term outcomes for construction, operations and maintenance. The integrated design process provided a platform to include responsible, sustainable options as a normal part of the design. Besides reusing the existing Mid-century building, provisions include solar panel arrays, materials selection, copious daylighting, energy efficient equipment, and water efficiency infrastructure. The university sought facilities that support collaborative interdisciplinary teaching & research to improve recruiting, research rank, and funding, all of which have been realised. With the South building design providing more space, there was the opportunity to blend researchers together based on interdisciplinary functional use, not faculty, and the additional floor of teaching space and research space brought further interdisciplinary opportunities to the precinct.