John Wardle Architects designed the Learning & Teaching Building which serves as the “front door” of Monash University’s Clayton Campus located in Melbourne, Australia.

The brief for LTB is for a multi-faculty learning facility that will serve a significant proportion of the student teaching load. Innovative formal learning and teaching spaces will be complemented by informal learning hubs that deliver a variety of study settings.

The LTB demonstrates a shift away from the modernist stand-alone tower instead incorporating a horizontal field of spaces set within a broad, low rise building. The learning activities of the interior are, in this way, made visible and accessible to the wider campus and community, rather than removed from the ground in a vertical structure.

Streets, courtyards, bridges, balconies and stairs are transformed into ravines, clearings, strands, perches, escarpments and amphitheatres that are choreographed to invent a new landscape of the interior.

At the centre of LTB, Ancora Imparo Way is treated like a ravine that turns through the building. The brick towers either side are reminiscent of other brick structures. They share their tapering and curvilinear character with the pottery kilns of Stoke-on-Trent in England. This borrowed reference to an industrial landscape could be taken to suggest the process of firing that starts with a malleable clay is abstractly akin to the process of learning.

Architect: John Wardle Architects
Photography: Peter Bennetts