Architectus has created a design that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit at the Macquarie University Incubator located in Macquarie Park, Australia.

The Macquarie University Incubator aims to amplify and imbue deep thinking around innovation, bringing together entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, collaboration and support. A place for startups to evolve their ideas and grow their businesses, the Incubator was designed to respond to the diverse and changing needs of its occupants, as well as two key aspects that informed the design of the space; a relocatable building and a short timeframe for its implementation.

The Incubator was conceived as a pair of pavilions, each with flexible layouts that lend themselves to the future adaptations and functions of the startups inside. A strong driver was the need for collaboration and interaction between individual startups and with each other, in addition to privacy for each startup to operate as its own business. With this in mind, we created open spaces and breakout areas, and smaller, private meeting rooms.

We looked to timber as the main construction material for the Incubator for its capacity to be beautifully engineered, swiftly fabricated to high quality, and for its potential for future dis-assembly and relocation, with the majority of components prefabricated offsite to ensure rapid construction on site and minimal disruption to the concurrent university semester. The resulting building was completed within five months of construction commencing, and despite flexibility and relocation being a strong factor of the original design brief, the Incubator has become so well loved that it’s likely it will now remain permanently in its current location.

The Incubator is a dramatic demonstration that Macquarie University is facilitating societal advancement through partnerships, through research, through invention and through high quality architectural design.

Architect: Architectus
Design Team: Luke Johnson – Principal, Nick Elias – Project Leader, Angel Yi Zhang – Architect, John Jeffrey – Architect, Hope Dryden – Graduate Architect, Taija Love – Student Architect
Contractor: Lipman
Photography: Brett Boardman