2016 National Architecture Awards: Daryl Jackson Award for Educational Architecture

Jury citation

Located in a park of eucalypts, adjoining a historic medical building and bordering a new medical precinct, the University of Queensland’s Oral Health Centre successfully navigates its institutional program and its significant scale to create a building that embeds itself in its urban environment. The building is a connecter between precincts while engaging with its place. Circulation between inside and out is seamless, enabling a sequence of experiences that exploit the mild climate and allow continual and pervasive connection to the outdoors. Topography is used to advantage as the building steps down the site to engage each level with the park. The articulated and playful forms sit beautifully within the canopy of trees and masterfully manage scale and height. Environments dedicated to dental teaching and practice are often highly clinical, more about the machine than the individual and associated with fear and anxiety. However, unwavering attention to craft, material and form in a building of this scale creates a truly humanizing experience, one that demonstrates both warmth and care. The practitioner, the teacher, the student and the patient have all been carefully considered in the design of this finely crafted work.

Read the project review by John de Manincor from Architecture Australia Sept/Oct 2015.