Our latest blog post by Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic).
Universities are often created and recreated from the inside out. Discussions on the interior of offices, of the benefits of one chair over another, and the number of meeting rooms are fine grained. If you have ever been scarred by discussions about open plan offices, the meterage of book shelves needed per academic and even the placement of kitchens and tea rooms, you will know what I mean. The university at which I work is no exception to this. Indeed, the illustrator, turned interior designer and campus planner Fred Ward was one of its first appointments.
The beauty and functionality of Ward’s contributions to design are rightly recognised today. Even when you see them every day, his tables and chairs, as well as other room furnishings are admirable for their sleek lines wrought from native hardwoods. They are a confident and pleasant reminder of the university’s beginnings.
But insides are not outsides, and it is nigh on impossible to think of an Australian university campus that is as deliberative in its outward appearance as it is in its inward expression. Stone, wood and pressed metal structures scream out the message that coordination will not be tolerated. This is why the process given the various titles of master planning, comprehensive planning or urban visioning is so very important.
Master plans are not architectural plans for buildings or groups of buildings. Rather, they are visual plans that create places. They show how natural landscape features, buildings, streets and open spaces connect; the proposed size and density of buildings; suggested activities for particular spaces; indications of where utilities will be located; and how people can get about by foot, bicycle and other forms of transport. They also suggest how a precinct or an area can be integrated into existing or future neighbourhoods.
Canberra and Environs, 1911, Marion Mahony Griffin, National Archives of Australia A710.38
Building along, restoring and accentuating an axial line is a privilege. You have to think not only about building height and density, but also how constellations of buildings and landscape architecture—predominantly trees—frame and point to endpoint features. Moreover, you have to balance that line with others that bisect it, including the deeper history lines set down by places of significance to Indigenous communities.
The fruitful twist in the master planning that initiated the construction project we are about to start was the recognition of the importance of the inside, outside. Over four years of interviews, focus groups and surveys brought forward ideas from a couple of thousand staff and students. These ideas emphasised the need to bring out from behind walls updated traditions and senses of engagement that normally take place inside buildings that are dotted over acres of a beautiful green campus. Think Ward meets human buzz in a garden.
It was hardly surprising, then, that the first draft of the updated master plan for the centre of campus talked about the axial line—University Avenue—as a punctuated series of rooms for people to move through and to settle in to. So far, so good.
Then we hit the bump that I see as the most problematic feature of master planning: the massing stage, or more precisely, the gap between massing drawing and architectural concept drawing stages.
Massing diagrams are problematic because people who are not familiar with planning can mistake them for architectural drawings. 3-D modelling has probably made this worse, with the blocks being interpreted out of proportion as skyscrapers. People even get hung up on the colours that are used for them. This is largely forgivable given the unedifying collection of brutalist horrors that universities have spawned, and which people love to hate.
The longer the period of time between a massing diagram and an architectural drawing, the greater potential anxiety of a community, particularly concerning scale and density. We proceeded to drawings relatively smoothly, but it took a lot of explaining—and some changes—to respond to people’s anxieties. It turns out that some of this may reflect relatively research findings in the Journal of Neuroscience that people’s depth perception may depend on their perception of their arm’s length. If you show people images using 3-D modelling or virtual reality platforms, their ability to judge the distance of objects improves if you use motion capture tags and trick them into thinking their arms are longer than they actually are. People who consider objects this way do far better than those who are asked to judge distances by touching objects with their hands, or those who cannot see their arms.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that urban planners, master planners and architects can forget how ordinary the brain is at considering distance.
It reminds us that the greatest challenge to outside planning is not perhaps our fascination with building interiors, but the interior of our heads. Next time around, I’d insist that we do massing in virtual reality, with all of us given long VR arms.
This blog’s shout out is for Joe Hrouda and the Civitas team, who helped us to start our journey from the inside, out