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The existing campus at Burwood, an outer suburb of Melbourne, was both dismal and confusing. Large buildings from different eras had been sited without reference to each other or to objectives of urban legibility and place-making. An iconic new building designed by Wood Marsh signals a strong positive identity for the university from the highway. Yet on the ground, unrelated buildings could not in themselves generate order and clarity throughout the campus, or form a central gathering place. The goals of Tract‘s landscape strategy were to unify and give meaning to the disparate built form elements and open spaces, and to establish one main focal point for the campus.
A design solution often lies in subtracting existing elements. Small-scale nondescript demountable buildings were cleared away in order to open up a wide swathe and create a strong axis running from the entry gate through to the library, the intellectual core of the institution. The axis establishes an ordering armature to the campus and makes sense of the faculty buildings located along it.
Towards the campus centre, the axis becomes a wide public promenade criss-crossed by many paths. A stylised amphitheatre in front of the student union 3nd a fountain spilling down the slope signal this as the university‘s centre. Here the site has an 8-metre cross fall. Initially Tract identified the natural catchment and drainage of stormwater into a creek as a possible design generator. This ecological idea was translated into the principal design feature, the flow-form fountain - recalling the fish rill of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, designed by Vignola in 1566 - where water swirls down a runnel into bilobal forms that oxygenate and purify it. The fountain simultaneously announces the new symbolic heart of the campus, negotiates the changes in level down the hill, and collects and cleans run-off catchment water, raising the utilitarian process to an aesthetic expression.
The utilitarian is also raised to an aesthetic level by the geometric pattern of crossing paths that demarcate desire lines. The diagonal paths recall Thomas Jefferson‘s tactic in laying out the University of Virginia in 1S17; he waited a year before locating the paths across the central green, until winter when he could observe where people typically walked by seeing their tracks in the snow. The graphic use of vector paths is characteristic of Tract‘s work. The paths not only provide routes and short cuts, but also define particular places for meeting and sitting, and by breaking down scale, they humanise the larger public space. Different decorative treatments of the hard paving also help to define distinct places.The coloured broken tiles of a section of paving make reference to Gaudi and contribute an organic element to the spiky geometry.
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