 | JOHN CURTIN SCHOOL OF MEDICAL RESEARCH Lyons’ latest institutional building is a dramatic and spatially porous cross-disciplinary research centre for the Australian National University.
REVIEW Laura Harding
PHOTOGRAPHY John Gollings
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The grand
north-eastern approach
to the John Curtin
School of Medical
Research at the
Australian National
University, with its
zigzagging facade and
elevated terrace.
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The staggered
western facade.
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Detail of the angular
forms on approach to
the building.
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Elevational view
from the north, showing
the arrangement of the
precast concrete panels.
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Detail of the carefully
formed precast concrete
panels, which display
pictograms relating to
cellular structures and
other medical imagery.
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Looking down into
the main stair void,
through which an
orange ribbon twists.
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A meeting room
showing the DNA helix
form on the facade.
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There is a strong
public connection to the
workplace through the
use of glazing.
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View showing the open-plan workspaces.
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Interior views
showing visual
connections between
workspaces and offices.
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Looking along the circulation
space, in which the building
gradually opens up to the views.
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The main entry into the
foyer space.
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The terrace and facade, which
closes the building off from direct
sunlight.
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Overview, showing
the elevated terrace and the
different facade treatments.
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A desire to interpret the rich miscellany of
contemporary architectural production through the
identification of common trends, themes and
tendencies has given currency to some rather
simplistic generalizations concerning the architectural
output of particular Australian cities. None has been
more colourfully portrayed than the alleged divide
between Sydney and Melbourne and the curiously
resilient corollary that depicts Sydney architects as
pitiless modernists, enslaved by empiricism and
order, and their Melburnian counterparts as wilful
artistes who eschew subtlety and rationality in an
indulgent pursuit of form and surface.
Given this context, it is immensely satisfying to
begin a review of a recently completed building by
Melbourne-based Lyons without lapsing into the
customary hyperbole concerning the visual qualities
of the building’s facade and surface – instead
acknowledging the incisive and thoughtful strategies
that underpin the project’s planning and organization.
The John Curtin School of Medical Research at
the Australian National University is a prestigious
medical research facility that counts two Nobel
Prize-winners among its alumni. Despite its
pre-eminence JCSMR-ANU must compete fiercely to
attract both “star” scientists and funding for its
programmes in molecular bioscience, immunology,
genetics and neuroscience. Consequently, the nature
and quality of the school’s new research laboratories
and workshops became the subject of focused
discussion and debate during the collaborative
briefing and design process conducted by Lyons
with the scientists and researchers from JCSMR-ANU.
The outcome of this process was not only a decisive
critique of the school’s existing facilities, but an
understanding of the flexibility required to
accommodate foreseeable changes in research
techniques and methods, and an aspiration to
promote team-based research practices among the
scientists and academics in the school.
The desire to foster cross-disciplinary
collaboration is a dominant trend in the educational,
commercial and corporate sectors. The architectural
response to this shift has been the development of
buildings with large floor plates that maximize the
number of people working in close proximity and
have the coincident appeal of increased economic
efficiency through their small perimeter-to-floor-area
ratios. The environmental and spatial implications
of this shift are as obvious as they are difficult to
mitigate. At JCSMR-ANU, Lyons has used a
disarmingly simple strategy to retain the
pedagogical benefits of the arrangement while
alleviating the physical shortcomings of the type.
The body of the JCSMR-ANU building is formed of
layered, linear bars of offices, support spaces,
corridors, small controlled laboratory spaces and
large PC2 Containment Level laboratories. These
bars are graded across the section of the building in
terms of their intensity of use, with the shared
laboratory spaces and open-plan academic offices
claiming the privileged perimeters. At regular
intervals these parallel ribbons are punctured by
perpendicular zones that slice through the building
from facade to facade through an enfilade of
apertures, thresholds and windows. These
penetrations make it simple to locate colleagues
without entering the PC2 Containment areas but,
most importantly, they leaven the buried interior
spaces by providing elongated vistas through the
layers of the building to the wider campus
landscape. Consequently the building has an
invigorating and porous spatial density.
Architecturally the dense, compact plan obliges
us to reconsider the relationship between interior
and exterior space. In Bigness Rem Koolhaas revels
in the notion of an architecture where “the distance
between core and envelope increases to the point
where the facade can no longer reveal what happens
inside. The humanist expectation of ‘honesty’ is
doomed: interior and exterior architectures become
separate projects”. Raphael Moneo inverts this
thinking with his appreciation of dense
“compactness”, valuing the extreme freedom it
offers for the organization of interior space within
a closed figure that “permits the building to live
silently in the city but aware of its own condition,
without flaunting the abundance of the interior”.
Neither Koolhaas’s exaggerated disjunction nor
Moneo’s urban discretion sit comfortably as a
rationale for JCSMR-ANU. The playfully ambivalent
meeting of interior and exterior dramatically
intensifies rather than denies their interdependence
and JCSMR-ANU certainly does not live “silently” in the campus. Its presence is flamboyant and
emphatic – but it does not flaunt, or conceal, its
interior world. Rather than present, it re-presents the
building’s interior with Lyons’ interest in abstraction
and signification variously employed on the
building’s exterior surface. Exquisitely formed
precast concrete panels, which relate to the
1,700-mm laboratory planning module, display
pictograms of the Vitruvian man, cellular structures,
DNA spirals and nitrogen bases – a medical “powers
of ten” rendered in soft, billowy white relief.
The DNA helix is formally interpreted in
communal spaces that erupt on the building’s facade
– in small meeting rooms for spontaneous, informal
discussion and in the main stair that offers an open
and generous vertical connection through the
building at the point where it will graft onto the
future stages. These spaces have a delightful spatial
munificence that breaks free from the taut density of
the plan proper and is heightened by the unfurling
of expansive views across Sullivans Creek towards
Black Mountain to the north and future courtyard
gardens to the south – but is somewhat
compromised by the prosaic detailing of the helical
elements. The orange ribbon that twists through the
main stair void hints at a playful fluidity that is
denied by a more stilted bending, folding and
collision of materials. Here tectonics become
an issue – elsewhere this is skilfully and
deliberately denied.
These moments probably wouldn’t raise an
eyebrow, were they not exposed by the sophisticated
formal resolution of the abstracted helical elements
that define the entry foyer. No trace here of Lyons’
famed 150-mm skin, replaced instead with
1,500-mm-deep glistening metallic blades that
elegantly flex in response to the arced geometry of
the adjacent oval, cupping a protected, elevated
public terrace at the building’s entry. Bronze, pale
blue and silver metallic panels are carefully detailed
to suppress any hint of connection or joint, imbuing
the facade with a strikingly surreal profile that cuts
a jaunty, jagged line against the sky. On approach,
they serendipitously pick up the distant ridgeline of
Black Mountain, curling it around the terrace and
stretching the building out towards South Oval.
Oriented to the north-east, their staggered positions
shade the glazing between from direct northern
sunlight, while reflecting shimmering light into the
foyer spaces and the zigzagging bridges and stairs
of an exhibition space that showcases the school’s
research and achievements.
The elevated terrace is already a much-loved
addition to the ANU campus, which, although
blessed with a lyrical landscaped setting, lacks a
complementary series of more active urban spaces
of this type. Its elevation gives it a wonderful
prospect over the university green that meanders
along Sullivans Creek and more pragmatically
provides the vast, impressively appointed workshop
spaces beneath with unimpeded vehicular access
and servicing. The decision to raise the terrace has
caused minor headaches with some finicky BCA,
DDA and OHS requirements, but even these do not
blunt the space’s potent public sensibility.
If you rely upon accepted wisdom, you could
easily be led to believe that Lyons’ work is limited
to “identity building” for institutions, the
“branding” of prosaic boxes or more wilful
compositional styling. JCSMR-ANU betrays a much
broader architectural interest and an appreciation of
early rather than late Venturian thinking – layering
Lyons’ well-documented investigations of surface
and signification with a more embedded
architectural “complexity” that explores form,
space, materiality and the architectural plan.
JCSMR-ANU is therefore also a salutary reminder.
Every now and again it is essential to check the
tendency to generalize, put down the photographs
and set aside the words of architects and critics –
to go and confront the work itself.
LAURA HARDING IS A SYDNEY-BASED WRITER AND
PRACTITIONER. SHE PARTICULARLY WISHES TO THANK
SUE ELSBURY AND BARRY WEBB FROM JCSMR-ANU FOR
THEIR ASSISTANCE IN PROVIDING ACCESS TO THE SCHOOL
DURING THE INTENSE PROCESS OF RELOCATION TO THEIR
NEW PREMISES.
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JOHN CURTIN SCHOOL OF MEDICAL RESEARCH, AT THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, CANBERRA
Architect Lyons.
Interior design Lyons.
Project manager
Hindmarsh Group.
Structural and civil
consultant Connell Mott
MacDonald. Electrical,
mechanical and lighting
consultant Umow Lai
and Associates.
Hydraulic consultant
Rimmington and
Associates. Acoustic
consultant Bassett
Acoustics. Landscape
architect EDAW
Gillespies. Building
surveyor Philip Chun
and Associates.
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