Monash University Bio-Medical Learning and Teaching Building
University Campus
Year - 2017-18
Client - Monash University
Scope - Sketch design through to contract admin
Location - Mnash University, Clayton, Victoria
Budget -
Team -CAStudios in collaboration with Aspect Studios, DCM Architects, Bonacci, DCWC, Jacobs, NDY, GTA.
The learning that takes place at the Monash University Biomedical Learning and Teaching Building produces the researchers responsible for advancing medicine and biomedical science. A key challenge for the design team was to design the building’s landscape to support the vital but sometimes confronting work that takes place inside.
Responding to the project brief and taking as a starting point a recognition that the understanding of the human body has moved from one based on external philosophical text/theories (Galen), through direct observation and dissection (Vesalius), to an understanding of ‘essential’ generative biology/DNA, CAStudios saw the potential of developing a site specific script/code from various site data to generate landscape patterning, spatial organisation, configuration and especially the potential of expression of code in surface treatments.
In addition, considering the optic regimes of the medical, we also saw an opportunity to express these various ‘modes of the visual’ in the landscape as well as providing an operational terminology, for example: a peel back of surfaces; a systems garden; embedded interactive technologies; etc. In particular, drawing upon an understanding the body-environment relationships as an enmeshment, we proposed that the landscape and building programs should be understood as an ecology rather than discrete entities.
Consequently, an outlook and planting scheme was generated to provide a connection with the building’s internal program. A green outlook presents itself from just about everywhere inside the building, supporting students working in the cadaver labs and the difficulty that work presents. The plants themselves comprise a mostly native palette of medicinal species, to connect the cutting-edge science taking place indoors with the natural world.
