 | UNSW LAW The new building by Lyons juggles the Faculty of Law’s social philosophy and UNSW’s master plan.
REVIEW SANDRA KAJI-O’GRADY
PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN GOLLINGS
|
|
Situated
between two
mature fig trees,
the main entrance
to the building
relates directly to
the surrounding
landscape.
|
The Faculty of
Law building proffers
differing facades for
each elevation.
|
Located where a car park and beer garden once stood, the new building maintains the “University Mall” and the line of existing poplar and fig trees.
|
Bold, graphic
elements lend
visual interest to the
ground-level agora.
|
“The Tree of
Knowledge”, a series
of trapezoidal timber
panels, spirals up
the primary vertical
circulation space.
|
A visual
connection to the
outside is maintained
in most spaces.
|
Customdesigned
furniture
punctuates the
articulated hallways.
|
The interior
colour palette has
been likened to the
ripe figs found on
neighbouring trees.
|
Condensed
secondary circulation
spaces encourage
informal contact
between staff and
students.
|
Maximum
natural light
penetration is
afforded via a
substantial lightwell
in the vertical
circulation space.
|
Both
the perimeter and
the interior of the
faculty library feature
extensive glazing.
|
Looking
through the
bookshelves in the
library.
|
|
|
When he presented the UNSW Faculty of Law at the
School of Architecture at UTS early last year, while
the building was still under construction, Corbett Lyon
was accused by a member of the audience of felling
Sydney’s best fi g trees and destroying a prime urban
space to make way for “his” building. Site selection and
axe wielding were not, in fact, Corbett’s responsibilities.
A former car park and beer garden, the site is part of the
rejuvenation of the north end of the mall as endorsed
by the UNSW Kensington Campus 2020 Master Plan,
of which our irate audience member had been an
author. At a cost of over $50 million, it is implausible
to pitch this competition-winning scheme as a wilful
imposition on an unsophisticated or careless client.
The charge could only be understood as distaste for
the architectural outcome. This distaste has been
collectively reinforced by the jury for the NSW chapter
of the 2007 RAIA architecture awards, who have
pointedly failed to shortlist the building. In what ways,
then, does Lyons’ design depart from the master plan
and how could this occur, given that each was prepared
around the same time for the same client?
Central to the master plan is the preservation of the
“University Mall” and the line of poplar and fig trees
that frames it. This is unbroken by the new building
– indeed, placement of the main entry between two
mature fi g trees emphasizes the relationship between
landscape and building. In relation to other objectives
in the master plan, the law building complements
the alignments, scale and materiality of neighbours;
it is a slab building of four stories as specified for that
location; it is permeable and provides through-building
links at the ground floor; and it maximizes natural light
penetration. Additionally, Lyons’ design has “a distinct
architectural character” as recommended for new
buildings. It is due to this last qualifier that curious and
diverting complaints about lost trees arise.
“Distinct” means “of marked difference”. Applied
to the management of the accretive design of a campus
as a desirable quality, distinctiveness is likely to work
against consistency of architectural expression or the
“even temper” that Philip Drew, in this journal in 2004,
admired in the university’s new architecture. If it was
the indistinct, polite distinction of MGT’s Scientia
that the authors of the master plan had in mind, this
was not what the Faculty of Law sought – or got – in
their fi rst purpose-built facility since opening in 1971.
Comprising the Schools of Law and Taxation (Atax) and
numerous research and community centres, these were
dispersed in temporary accommodation. The faculty has
always maintained a strong focus on social justice and
change, exemplified by the provision of free legal advice
to the community through the Kingsford Legal Centre
and contributions to public debate through the Gilbert
and Tobin Centre of Public Law. Larissa Behrendt, Peter
Garrett and Pat O’Shane are among their alumni.
In keeping with their philosophy, the conventional
large lecture format is replaced by seminar-style classes
based on interactive dialogue between students and
lecturers. Accordingly, there are 13 small classrooms in
the new building where most of the teaching takes place
and a condensed circulation that supports informal
social contacts between colleagues and between staff
and students. While formal tactics familiar from the
Lyons oeuvre – the oblique line and folded plane,
repeated graphic patterns and stripes, and an abstraction
of structure and material – are repeated here, these have
been tailored for the specific programme and accurately
mirror the faculty’s strong identity as a progressive and
engaged institution.
The Dean of Law, Professor David Dixon, considers
the building and the ambitions of the faculty to be in
concert. Promotional literature is enthusiastic about
the new building, rightly proclaiming its “distinctive
facade” to be “hard to miss”. As with earlier projects by
the practice – the botany building for the University
of Melbourne and Building C for the University of
Swinburne’s Lilydale campus – the building’s four main
facades are highly individuated and complex in their
layering, folding, screening and peeling. While some
of the facade treatment responds to solar orientation
and access, there is elaboration for visual pleasure
in its own right.
Circulation through the 12,000 square metres of
floor space is legible and the programmatic organization
considered, yet the spatial experience is convoluted
and complex. From most spaces – even the 350-seat
auditorium – you can see out to the campus or to other
spaces within the building. Connections between
spaces are multiplied visually and physically.
From any point outside the building to an individual
offi ce, there are always numerous alternative paths
available. The corridors of academic offices do not
subdivide into linear wings, but circle back upon
themselves and around courtyards cut into the top
two floors.
Embedded in the main vertical circulation space is a
spiralling pattern of trapezoidal timber panels that the
architects refer to as “the tree of knowledge”. Lyons’ tree
is to the tree-columns marching through MGT’s Scientia
at the other end of the mall what figs are to pines. The
fig is tangled, fecund and produces suckers, whereas the
scent and tidy form of the pine lend themselves easily
to car fresheners and idealization. The deep purples
and greens that dominate the interior are also redolent
of ripe figs. And at the risk of stretching too far the
vegetal allusions, what come to mind are the evocative
distinctions Deleuze and Guattari make in A Thousand
Plateaus between the arborescent and the rhizomatic.
For them, rhizomatic organizations and ways of
thinking are non-hierarchical and multiple like grasses.
The rhizomatic has its spatial correlative in “smooth” space – space that is open to creative movement in any
direction. Smooth spaces are composed of trajectories
rather than destinations and are filled by events rather
than things. The arborescent, by contrast, subdivides,
like a tree, from a larger category into smaller and
smaller categories – much like the organization
of knowledge into disciplines and departments in
universities. Arborescent thinking has its spatial
correlative in striated spaces, which are ordered,
structured, gridded and sedentary.
It is interesting to consider the organization of the
university, idealized in the master plan, as arborescent,
with its call for precincts and places hierarchically
organized. At the level of the faculty, the approach
that has been given form in Lyons’ building tends to
the rhizomatic. Deleuze and Guattari do not propose
the rhizomatic and the arbolic as opposites, nor do
they value one over the other. They suggest that these
are tendencies and useful ways of thinking, not fixed
categories or truths. Consequently, some of these terms
have found their way from the desks of academics to
university managers and management more broadly.
In undertaking significant work for several universities,
Lyons is well versed in current debates about the
physical and corporate organization of the university
in relation to strategic goals and activities. Universities
are seeking more flexible, responsive, horizontal
structures better suited to the challenges of global
culture and business, yet also wishing to preserve
their role as loci of critical thinking, self-knowledge,
humanism and inherited traditions. Lyons’ new
building at UNSW gives cogent architectural expression
to one faculty’s desire to be relevant, progressive and
visible, while locating it as a node within an underlying
order that operates with different ambitions. Moving
back and forth between the singular urban gesture of
the mall and the highly condensed spaces of the law
building, one senses the complexity of the university’s
divergent undertakings and the productive tensions
between them. It is a great pity that some local
architects have dismissed the building on the grounds
that its aesthetic departs from the decorous modernist
box without making the effort to understand how its
formal appearance and spatial organization respond to
the client and their challenging needs, or to recognize
that there are many forms good architecture can take.
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady is Head of School, School of
Architecture, at the University of Technology, Sydney.
|
|
A computer laboratory within the library space.
|
| |
The 350-seat auditorium.
|
|
|
|
FACULTY OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, KENSINGTON
Architect
Lyons.
Structural consultant
Bonacci Group.
Mechanical and
electrical consultant,
fire and fire service
engineer
Bassett Kutter Collins.
Acoustic consultant
Marshall Day
Acoustics.
Hydraulic consultant
Alexander and
Associates.
Facade engineer
Connell Mott
McDonald.
Quantity surveyor
consultant
Slattery Australia.
construction
Rider Hunt.
Building surveyor
Gardner Group.
Project manager
McLachlan Lister.
Construction
manager
Bovis Lend Lease.
Client
University of New
South Wales,
Faculty of Law.
|
|
