Location: Clayton, Australia.

Architect: John Wardle.

The Monash University Learning and Teaching Building (LTB) is a unique building that is designed as a field of activity rather than an object within a field. The building is inspired by the surveyor Eugene Bellairs who laid out a one mile grid of roads across the site in 1853. The LTB is a low building with horizontal patterns of occupation that creates a sense of inhabiting a small city or township within a single building. The interior is made of the materials of the campus, making the demarcation between inside and outside ambiguous. The building is a place for learning, inextricably linked to its place, and fostered by settings within a landscape of unexpected encounter. The LTB provides a significant proportion of teaching spaces for the campus and is organised around Ancora Imparo Way that continues through the building and the northern courtyard entry point. The major interior spaces have a specific character, and the northern atrium is filled with a corkscrew stair that widens in places to become an amphitheatre of informal study. The LTB also accommodates workspace for the Office of Learning & Teaching and the Faculty of Education. The perimeter roof is a series of folded light monitors that encompass the uppermost floor while concealing rooftop plantrooms. The roof geometry introduces varied qualities of natural light whilst screening the glare of low-angle sunlight from the east and west. A perforated zinc screen acts as a veil around the perimeter of the building that provides shade while maintaining views through the glazed façade. This profiled and scalloped screen is folded in a way that recalls the texture and patterns of the Stringybark tree. Different radii for the scalloped shapes relate to the varying scale and contexts of the bus interchange, pedestrian walk, landscape and northern courtyard.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein.