 | AUSTRALIAN WILDLIFE HEALTH CENTRE Minifie Nixon’s Australian Wildlife Health Centre at the Healesville Sanctuary takes a highly experimental approach to programme, technique and form.
REVIEW Naomi Stead PHOTOGRAPHY Peter Bennetts
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Overview of the Australian
Wildlife Health Centre at
the Healesville Sanctuary,
seen on approach.
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Inside the
“Impact Experience”
interpretative space at
the building’s centre,
looking across to the
visible laboratory and
surgical spaces. The gold
tensile structure of the
“Costa surface” is above.
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Facade
detail showing the
“apse” which houses
reception. The pattern is
generated through a
“cellular automaton”,
which is programmed to
take formal objects such
as the apse or doors and
windows into account
when making a pattern.
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Looking from within
the courtyard up into the
golden form of the
“Costa surface” above.
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It is not often that one hears a post-occupancy client
comment that a building is “perfect … there’s
nothing that could have been better”. It is even more
rare (and refreshing) to hear a work of serious,
erudite architecture described as “a ripper”. These
are the words of Dr David Middleton, senior vet at
Melbourne’s Healesville Sanctuary, about the new
Australian Wildlife Health Centre (AWHC) by
Minifie Nixon. The AWHC is Minifie Nixon’s
second public building after the much-discussed
Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Middleton, who was the driving force behind
what he believes to be the first open veterinary
hospital in the world, is clearly thrilled with the
building. His idea was to turn a traditional
veterinary hospital literally inside out, exposing all
of the procedures and operations that would usually
happen behind closed doors. This programme and
its spatial elaboration were developed over time, in
close collaboration with the architects, and Paul
Minifie notes that zoo staff were unwavering in
their ambition and belief in what architecture can
do. In return, on a programmatic level, they have
received a very well planned, practical, modest and
clever building. On a formal level, meanwhile, they
have received a very odd beast indeed.
Zoos today have reinvented themselves. No
longer is it the humans who are protected from the
dangerous creatures behind bars: we, the gawking
hordes, are now recognized as the true threat. This
is particularly evident at Melbourne’s Healesville
Sanctuary, which in its very name outlines the
precarious position of Australia’s indigenous fauna
in the wild, threatened from every side by loss of
habitat, feral predators, and the daily carnage
wreaked by cars. This last aspect is emphasized at
the AWHC by a large faux street sign warning
“Beware! Humans!” The facility acts as the hospital
for the sanctuary’s permanent inhabitants, but it
also has an important role as a centre where injured
wildlife, brought in by members of the public, is
received, treated, rehabilitated and ultimately
prepared for release again.
The visitor first enters a main gallery, a
doughnut of space with a glass-enclosed courtyard
in the centre, and the outer wall slightly deformed
into a bulging “apse” behind the reception desk.
Here the visitor is placed immediately in the midst
of the action, with a series of glass walled rooms
bordering this space – an operating theatre,
laboratory, examination room and recovery areas are
all directly visible, while a necropsy is accessible
but protected behind a screen. This arrangement
means that a vet in the laboratory identifying a
pathogen can speak directly to the people watching
outside, just as visitors can observe operations, live
and close up, and even witness post-mortem
dissections. When we visited, a vet and two nurses
were operating on a kookaburra, inserting a steel pin
into its broken wing. It was an amazing thing to see,
with the X-ray of the broken wing visible on a
lightbox and the anaesthetized bird laid out on the
table, no more than a metre away from us. It is
through authentic experiences such as this, it is
hoped, that visitors will gain a sense of the
connectedness of all animal and human life,
extending to an increased sense of responsibility for
wildlife in the wider world.
Interpretative displays by Cunningham Martyn
line the centre’s main space, and these are effective,
interesting and well conceived. The workspace and
research library at the rear of the building are
generous and well lit, and apparently pleasant
places to work.
But the real architectural action is on the facade
and in the main gallery above eye level, where the
ceiling is a startling surface of continuous
compound curves, gold fabric swooping upward
into a series of funnel-like orifices. This element is
in fact a formalized mathematical concept known as
a “Costa surface”, a “complete minimal embeddable
surface of finite topology”. Its use here is part of the
architects’ ongoing interest in design technique, and
in bringing maths and architecture into the close
adjacency they enjoyed in earlier centuries. But
while the association was historically about beauty,
proportion and order, in the AWHC mathematical
geometry is used to a different end altogether.
There is also a level of mimesis in the AWHC,
and it is of a curious type. It is not a zoomorphic
mimicry of a creature in finished form, such as can
be found at Gregory Burgess’s World of the Platypus,
also at Healesville, with its platypus reference in
plan. It is rather a mimicry of the more fundamental
organic processes that produce all life, filtered
through and modified by digital technology. This is
most evident in the vaguely gecko-like mottled
stripes of the AWHC facade, where the architects
used a “cellular automaton” algorithm which, when
plugged into the computer and set in motion,
“designed” the blockwork pattern. In generating the
pattern, the computational process also “knew” where programmatic building elements – doors,
windows and so on – were located, and transformed
the pattern in response. Minifie states that the
intention here was “not a cold mathematical or
experimental exercise,” and sure enough the
resulting pattern chimes very well with the building
programme. It opens itself to metaphor without
pastiche, it expresses both artifice and the organic,
and it suits the scale and pretensions of the
building. It also seems to avoid some of the
potential pitfalls of this kind of design approach,
namely that it can result in a coy retreat, a refusal to
admit the actual role of aesthetic judgment, a false
and disingenuous abandonment of authorship and
“design” as such.
But while this process works well in the facade,
it is less convincing in the Costa surface which, by
its nature, cannot be adapted – it is a self-contained
and self-fulfilling form.
The interest and pleasure in appropriating such
forms in architecture seems to lie in the
inventiveness of working out how to use them –
here we have this fixed complex form, now how big
should we make it and what can we do with it? But
there is a danger in this approach – that the
appropriated element can be both conceptually and
formally out of sync with the rest of the building.
It seems to me that this is the case here: the gold
element is bewildering in its incongruity, especially
within what is otherwise a very coherent building.
It is clearly far more than a solar chimney or
skylight, and while it draws attention to itself as
though it had a representational function (its height
and colour alludes to cupolas, Minifie explains), it
is very difficult to work out what that would be.
Its spatial high jinks work well internally: the
effort of puzzling out the geometry and construction,
the appreciation of the vertical interpenetration of
internal and external space, and the peculiar effects
of light and air in the central courtyard are all
curious, novel and pleasing. But externally, to my
eye, the gold eruption above the parapet is
perplexing.
In thinking and writing about this part of the
building I have swung between extremes: between
admiring the scholarliness and consistent
experimental daring of the architects; feeling
exasperated at what seems an intensely idiosyncratic
(not to say peculiar and arcane) exploration of
concerns which have nothing to do with this
programme or client; appreciating the logic of the
gold element as an expression of hierarchy within a
flat disposition of programme (the whole thing can
be read as a kind of perverse Stockholm Library);
feeling a simultaneous distaste and fascination for
the gold thing’s aesthetic and materiality, while
also being amused by the architects’ willingness to
redeem tensile fabric surfaces from their “hideously
abject” (in Minifie’s words) association with service
station canopies; and pondering the place of all this
in the venerable tradition of the architectural folly.
Ultimately, the simple reality is that the activities
going on inside the building are so fascinating, and
so well served by the architecture, that the more
inexplicable or impenetrable aspects of the
“content” will remain unremarked on by its
occupants and the lay public. Meanwhile we
architects will continue with our abstruse
disciplinary debates, which is surely the point.
The complex and contradictory reactions that this
building will generate in its architectural audiences
are surely one of the project’s great strengths.
As the fulfilment of a complex brief, the building
is a resounding success. As an example of the
architectural process helping to explore and expand
a new kind of programme, and of the architect as a
facilitator and agent in this process, it is impressive.
As a formal outcome, while new, strange and
interesting, it is not always so immediately
satisfying. But if a building can juggle, sing and ride
a unicycle at the same time, it seems churlish to
complain if it drops the occasional baton.
NAOMI STEAD IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY. SHE WOULD LIKE
TO THANK GAVIN PERIN AND SANDRA KAJI-O’GRADY FOR
THEIR COMMENTS ON THIS REVIEW.
TECHNIQUE AND THE AWHC
In our work we find it useful to explicitly
consider design techniques, as it is around
techniques that the other stuff of architecture
organizes itself. Design techniques establish a
domain of possibility in which a building
comes to be, and to be apprehended.
A technique can be understood as something
that defines the properties of elements, their
qualities and the relations they can enter into.
These elements need not be material things, but,
to make sense in an architectural context, they
must be able to have a material instantiation.
A building can be understood as one of many
possibilities consistent with a given design
domain (think of the vast populace of the
Miesian domain). Many of the significant
architectural values of a project come about
through specific decisions made within the
parameters of the design space – decisions
about composition, materials and so on
establish emphasis and value. Some of these
aspects may be addressed in the main critical
text. Here the focus is on the techniques.
The Costa surface is a “complete minimal
embeddable surface of finite topology”. It is an
element that has the smallest surface area for
its constraints, could continue without
boundary and does not intersect itself. Until this
surface was discovered by Costa in 1984, the
only other known surfaces with these properties
were the plane, the helicoid and the catenoid –
all three well known to architecture. The Costa
surface was discovered through “experimental
mathematics”, whereby computers are used to
investigate a large number of cases prior to
deriving formal proofs. Such surfaces cannot be
known directly; they require a computational
process which iteratively finds a final form from
a set of constraints. This mode of working –
finding a resolution of “embodied forces” –
places the designer in a different relation to the
building than that of “wilful formmaker”.
Similarly, the “embodied forces” are available
to be apprehended by those experiencing the
building. At the AWHC the Costa surface
element is resolved to form the roof, courtyard,
skylights and solar chimney to the public areas.
A cellular automaton is a collection of
“coloured” cells on a grid of a specified shape,
which evolves through a number of discrete
time steps according to a set of rules based on
the states of neighbouring cells. Cellular
automata were studied in the early 1950s as a
possible model for biological systems. The
particular rules used at the AWHC are a
weighted sum of the regions surrounding a given
cell and applied to an initially random seeding.
The sequence always converges to a stable
pattern, which is expressed as a masonry setout.
The horizontal or vertical components of the
rules are weighted according to the proximity
of various building elements, allowing the
building skin to respond to both expressive
requirements and building programme. Paul Minifie
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AUSTRALIAN
WILDLIFE HEALTH
CENTRE
Architect Minifie
Nixon—project team
Ellen Yap, Sam Rice,
Fiona Nixon, Barend
Meyer, Paul Minifie,
Nicholas Hubicki,
Brandon Heng, Matthew
Herbert. Interpretive
consultant Cunningham
Martyn Design.
Landscape architect
Rush Wright &
Associates. Services
consultant IrwinConsult.
Structural consultant
AHW. Tensile engineer
Tattersalls. Specification
consultant Davis
Langdon. Building
surveyor Philip Chun
and Associates. Quantity
surveyor WT
Partnership. Project
manager Root Projects.
Builder Behmer and
Wright. Landscape
Healesville Sanctuary
Works, Horticultural
Departments. Client
Zoos Victoria,
Healesville Sanctuary
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