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Projects RMIT Design Hub When A Square Building Flips Out: With more than 16, 000 rotating glass discs, a center for multidisciplinary design gives a new spin to engaging with its surroundings.
The 2-foot-diameter glass discs covering the building rotate to shade interiors and provide an animated skin that captures and reflects light in different ways.
Nearby Apartments In The Rmit Design Hub Precinct In Melbourne Stock Photo
Most floors in the main building offer large 'warehouse' spaces for trans'disciplinary teams of designers to meet and work on changing projects.
The project earned the Green Building Council of Australia's highest rating at the time it opened, thanks to automated sunshading provided by movable and fixed discs on the main building, as well as perimeter-air intakes and fine-mist sprinklers in the double-glazed inner skin.
Sean Godsell is a surprise. I'm expecting a rising rock star of an architect, a Melbourne Bjarke Ingels, with more success than he knows how to use. The man I find is almost the opposite'more in the mold of Glenn Murcutt, with a small, dedicated practice, an intense seriousness about the job, and a staunch devotion to making architecture from first principles.
Rmit Design Hub, Australia
Godsell's reputation, like Murcutt's, is bigger than his buildings, which are themselves remarkably Murcuttesque, with their orthogonal forms, underdressed materials, and attenuated plans. Mostly boxes, they range from Future Shack, the 1995 parasol-sheltered habitable shipping container that first put Godsell on the international stage, through a series of widely published steel-and-timber houses. They stand in contradistinction to the typical Melbourne shtick, which implies that architecture is a bit of a giggle and repeatedly reenacts Venturi with the multicolored, the stuck-on, the decorative. Godsell is undisturbed by this, saying, 'I'm happy to work in isolation.'
Why the box? All architects fear being boring, says Godsell. The box is just the hardest form to make interesting. What is no surprise is that Godsell's latest triumph, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Design Hub, is yet another box (or rather two), writ tall.
Highly nuanced and spatially serene, this project works on several levels and scales. From a distance, at the clash of two street grids that marks one of Melbourne's messiest and least charming precincts, it reads as an exercise in cool self-possession: translucent, ordered, its glowing skin folded with loose precision, kimono-like, about a solid core.
File:rmit Design Hub Detail.jpg
Closer up, you notice that the skin on one box has nearly 16, 250 sandblasted-glass discs, which can be used for applied solar research and one day may fuel the building. (For more on the façade, go to the Dynamic Facades CEU story.) Get even closer and you see that the discs become more opaque, their tessellation more dominant. The discs rotate (vertically on three walls, horizontally on the other) to reduce solar gain; when they do, the building becomes more textural, acquiring a reptilian scaliness.
Australian universities can be divided into those established long ago on their own sprawling campuses and Johnny-come-lately institutions that are more scattered but also more urban. The latter stand at the forefront of current commitments to urban reinvestment and community connectivity, a vogue on which RMIT wholeheartedly capitalizes.
Margaret Gardner, RMIT's vice chancellor and the primary client for the Design Hub, says she wanted a building that would unify the design disciplines across this most urban of campuses, providing flexible studio spaces (or 'warehouses') for transdisciplinary postgraduate research teams while drawing the life of the city in and through it.
Rmit Design Hub Opens
It's a nice program and well fulfilled by Godsell's design, with its pair of boxes: an eight-story stack of flexible studio and exhibition spaces, and a two-story archives wing. A broad, caf'-lined pedestrian space ramps between the two buildings, linking the street at one end of the site to a forthcoming commercial development at the other.
Structurally, the tall building is pretty conventional, with steel-clad concrete columns supporting partly-post-tensioned floor slabs from which the facade is hung. The low archives wing offers a visual and structural counterpoint, with a set of rectilinear steel tubes slipped one inside the other.
In the tall box, each main floor has a vast 'warehouse' space for changing, project-based design teams and a parallel 'long room' that serves as circulation, exhibition, and gathering space. On top of the building, four steel-portal pavilions house seminar rooms that open onto a roof deck.
Spring Fashion Week Launches At Rmit Design Hub
A glance at Godsell's oeuvre suggests a rationalist, Miesian approach. And Mies is certainly there. But less predictable influences can be seen too, in five 'tributes''to Shinohara, Corbusier, Palladio, Michelangelo, and Peter Corrigan.
Corrigan, father of Melbourne's Venturi-ism, taught Godsell and employed him briefly as a student (before the three years Godsell spent, more significantly, working in London with Denys Lasdun). The tribute takes the form of a wall-size supergraphic''MOTHER KNOWS''from a 1981 Corrigan artwork on a Melbourne tram.
The other tributes, being spatial, are more interesting. There's the door-within-a-door at one of the archives' entrances (Michelangelo's San Lorenzo Chapel), the archives' layered box front (Palladio's Il Redentore), the slender off-form columns in the main building's basement workshop and foyer (Corbu's Ahmedabad), and, most enchanting, the long, ruthless Shinohara stair that drops 29 feet in a slot 195 feet long and 6 feet wide that runs through the archives on the ground floor.
Rmit Design Hub Gallery
But one influence is the most surprising and entrancing of all'John Soane. At first glance, Soane's house in London seems to represent everything that Godsell's boxes preclude: complexity, darkness, symbolism, intrigue, romance. Yet Godsell says, 'There's a lot of Soane in this building.' He's right. The winding route, the choreographed glimpses (one spanning the length of the Shinohara stair), the use of darkness as a ground for light, the way delight is deployed to enrich commodity; pure Soane. If good architecture involves complexity that appears simple, minimalism that feels rich, and pragmatism fleshed out with beauty, then this is it.
The outer skin of the Hub incorporates automated glass sun shading cells that include solar power infrastructure and fresh air intakes that improve the internal air quality and reduce running costs.
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Rmit Design Hub Sports An Operable Glass And Steel Facade
This course will review the construction of basic types of on-grade and roof systems, as well as a range of hardscaping products including pavers, slabs and retaining walls.
This course explores the features, surface materials, and design options for rooftop deck systems and provides an overview of recommended planning and installation guidelines. The purpose of the Design Hub is to provide accommodation in one building for a diverse range of design research and post graduate education. RMIT is a world leader in design research however post graduates are currently dissipated across various campuses and facilities. The Hub provides a collegial research base where post graduates in fields such as fabric and fashion design will work alongside those involved in architecture, aeronautical engineering, industrial design, landscape architecture, urban design and so on.
Research groups have the ability to locate and fine tune their accommodation within ‘warehouses’ - open plan spaces where research teams can set up and tailor their work environment to suit their particular needs. Teams may stay for anywhere from six months to three years depending on the nature of and funding limits to their research and education programs. Research may include the need for workshops to make physical models to be located alongside computer studios, three dimensional printing, virtual reality modelling and so on. Given the time frames associated with research projects all the warehouses require a high level of adaptability and flexibility. In that sense these spaces are designed to accommodate the organic nature of research - ever evolving, adapting, changing and growing.
Rmit Design Hub
The plan of the Hub acknowledges the desire for incidental cross pollination where researchers from one field encounter those from completely unrelated other fields as part of their day to day use of the building. An exhibition space and design archive provide a public interface with both industry and research outcomes. These spaces combined with a variety of lecture, seminar and multi purpose rooms facilitate high level exchanges in a number of forums.
The Hub has a large number of ESD features and incorporates strategies of water, waste and recycling management that are the equal of any ESD focussed building on the planet. In particular the outer skin of the Hub incorporates automated sunshading that includes photovoltaic cells, evaporative cooling and fresh air intakes that improve the internal air quality and reduce running costs. The cells have been designed so that they can be easily replaced as research into solar energy results in improved technology and part of the northern façade is actually dedicated to ongoing research into