Monash College,
750 Collins Street
The Monash College project is a radical interior refurbishment of 750 Collins Street in the Docklands, transforming and repurposing a major ‘corporate campus’ typology into a new education campus for Monash University. Monash College is a ‘pathway program’ for international and local students to develop their skills for future enrolment within Monash University higher education courses. As a student-centred design, the campus brings together teaching, student support and social spaces in a way that eases the transition into university life. Opened in 2021, it is the new home of the College, with its design as a ‘vertical village’ seeking to foster innovation and collaboration in a progressive and diverse student-centred campus. Its vertical campus approach organises collaborative learning environments across stacked floors, supporting cross-disciplinary interaction and informal study.
Designed in collaboration with NMBW Architecture Studio, Studiobird, Gilby + Brewin, and Glas Urban, the project creates a new central campus area that links together a host of formal and informal learning spaces, a range of specialist learning areas and accommodation for 700 teaching staff. This shared authorship delivers innovative learning spaces tuned to different cohorts, disciplines and teaching modes. With over 40,000 metres squared of refurbished space made accessible through an intuitive ‘figure eight’ circulation loop and multiple vertical circulation systems, the Monash College project is a unified ‘campus village’ right in the heart of the Docklands. The loop strengthens learning environment design by making destinations legible and reducing back-tracking across deep floorplates.
Education & Learning
Carey Lyon
NMBW Architecture Studio, Studiobird, Glas Urban, Gilby + Brewin
Monash College
750 Collins Street, Docklands VIC 3008
Located on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people
40,000m2 (NLA)
Complete, 2021
We tried to create a ‘home away from home’ for students by collaborating with other local design practices to maximise the diversity of spaces within very large floor plates, so that students can seek out a place that suits their needs – noisy or quiet, social or focused, supported by College staff or working with their peers.
Carey Lyon, Director, Lyons.
The Monash College project involves repurposing a previously corporate space to accommodate a complex educational brief as a ‘vertical village’. The campus provides 180 teaching and learning spaces, other areas such as social spaces and includes workplace accommodation for 700 staff across 10 floors of the building. Within the vertical village, student experience design is expressed as a mix of quiet retreats, social hubs and staff-supported zones. To create a diverse campus for learning, and to nurture a broader student experience directly through the architectural interiors, the project was designed as a collaboration between many design practices. The overarching design concepts and strategies were developed through this collaboration, with each design practice undertaking lead design roles on various parts of the project brief. Clear scopes between design teams enabled educational facility planning at scale while maintaining coherence across the campus. Each practice also designed a series of smaller student peer-to-peer learning and relaxation spaces, that are interspersed within the primary program. The overall interior is experienced by students as a genuine ‘campus village under one roof’ and reflects the diversity of the students who occupy it. These interstitial areas operate as student engagement spaces, encouraging peer-to-peer learning and everyday wellbeing between classes.
The ‘bones’ of the existing corporate campus were fully repurposed, including a network of interior atriums, vertical transportation systems, interior landscapes, and the large floor plates (each over 5,000m2). To further enact the transformation, these elements were then extended and modified to meet the needs of a significant increase in population and occupancy. Entry and arrival spaces were changed to optimise universal access and intuitive wayfinding. This adaptive transformation aligns with campus modernization goals while limiting construction waste relative to a full rebuild. The campus was also ‘de-corporatised’ in terms of its overall materiality, with raw structural concrete exposed to most areas and largely exposed services throughout. The robust material palette supports learning space flexibility as programs and technologies evolve. In doing so, the project is not only a large learning fitout, but is a totally new conceptualisation of the building’s interior. The primary organising concept within the interiors is a new central street running through the building (which had not existed in the corporate campus), anchored at either end by new landscape wintergardens, linking together the vertical circulation systems. The central street is complemented by wintergardens that act as campus life facilities for informal study, orientation and events.
From this street concept, a further ‘figure eight’ loop of circulation is created for intuitive wayfinding and minimising dead ends within the large floor plates. This loop allows the large-scale educational brief to be accommodated around its interior form. It also creates a single unifying campus concept within a rich, complex and diverse design, created through the work of each design practice on key parts of the learning brief. Together these moves define academic collaboration areas where teaching rooms meet social settings at clear wayfinding nodes.
Carey Lyon, Co-Founders, Practice Executive
View Carey's Profile
Designed by Lyons in collaboration with Haworth Tompkins and Silver Thomas Hanley, the boundary-breaking ECU City campus was unveiled in 2021 and early works are now underway. Recently, Sean Henriques, Program Director at ECU spoke with Architecture AU on his experience working with Lyons.
As 2021 comes to a close, Corbett Lyon addressed the studio last week and reflected on the year that was.
Lyons Graduate, Ashlee Murphy, wins the AIA VIC Graduate Prize
The Emerging Architects and Graduate Network have invited architects to consider a message they would share with their younger selves, and this week they’ve shared words from Lyons Director, Carey Lyon.
Curtin University’s Midland Campus receives a 2020 National Award for Educational Architecture.
