Architecture

It speaks of a time and place, but outlives passing trends of what’s in or out.  

It designs for the present, nods to the past and plans for the future. 

Architecture is more than just creating shelter — life plays out, in and around it. 

Our homes, our schools, our parks, our bridges …the urban world around us didn’t just happen. It was planned. 

From the private to the public, architecture influences the way we live, work and celebrate with one another. 

It lets nature in. 

It plays with light and shade, wind and stillness, structure and surface.

And it’s ever-changing. 

New materials, building techniques, design tools…they all come together with bright imaginations. 

It’s an opportunity to design the future we want to see.

To take those big ideas…and turn them into a built reality. 

So… be the architect of what’s next.

So the partnered studio is a really integral part of how we teach in the Master of Interior Design. We partnered with GHDWoodhead, they're a large global design practice, and their kind of specialist area is educational learning environments. So that allowed us to expose the students to a really extraordinary set of experts.

My role in the studio experience was to facilitate GHDWoodhead expertise in education and to bring our multidisciplinary specialist to share their experience and stimulate the students with opportunity to embed in their future of hybrid learning.

One of the critical things that they gained from GHDWoodhead being involved in the studio was exposure to a case study project, which was the Wurun campus in Fitzroy, and in that particular instance they were really exposed in detail to a very complex contemporary design of a campus, thinking about the campus as an urban condition, multi-story, which is unusual for high schools, but also a campus that's interconnected with its communities.

We were asked to generate quite a lot of prototypes of learning environments, learning situation, and then you're kind of making an assemblage of them and then really experiment with how things come together and what's the relationship that it produced.

I think the future of learning, it's not just provide students a comfortable learning environment, but also create social relations between student and space, student and teachers, students among themselves, while creating a dynamic learning environment.

It was really terrific just to get that expertise from a practitioner who's on the ground running, doing a live project, and use that as a basis to do their work and to ask questions about how they go about their processes in design. That was very helpful to have GHDWoodhead on board.

We have the opportunity to engage and learn about their design process, the value and strategy Tactics in actualising an educational campus. But I guess what really struck me out of this is the active engagement. Like I really felt that we are sharing a strong enthusiasm towards design and really towards the future of learning environments.

Hopefully for the students it was a really rich experience and one that they found both challenging, because of that kind of group work, but also one that allowed their work to progress much further than it would, than it would working alone.

I think the sort of the two way flow, you know there's no sort of barriers between designers and in our business we try to make everyone the designer, whether they be an architect, an engineer, an interior designer or landscape architect.

Everybody has a contribution to make to design and nobody's got a monopoly on good ideas, or the right idea, because that's something you workshop and you figure out in the process of design, and so we love that sort of interaction

with the students here and we just take those ideas and hopefully share a few ideas to get on that continual cycle of learning and improvement.

It's been a great opportunity for the students to witness the collaboration that works within private practice, not only within their own studio, but to external consultants as well. Also, the amount of research that goes into responding to a brief, they were able to tap into that knowledge and the expertise that GHDWoodhead had to offer.