A pair of architects have launched a bid to heritage protect a 1970s university building built among the bush on Griffith University’s Nathan Campus in Brisbane, which the university plans to demolish.
Completed in 1977, the Australian Environmental Studies Building was designed by John Simpson, the then Brisbane-based director of the architectural practice John Andrews International. It was home to Australia’s first degree in environmental science and was distinguished architecturally by the way it responded to its natural setting.
The university is planning to demolish the building to make way for a $200 million, eight-storey building catering to 3,500 students. Now architects Laurie Jones and Jim Gall, who both studied at the university, have submitted an application to the Queensland Heritage Council to have the building listed. They argue it is significant as an example of accessible and interconnected campus design, marking a turning point from the closed “sandstone” universities of the past to the open “plate-glass” universities, where the teaching style aligned with the tenets of modernist architecture.
The Australian Environmental Studies Building today.
Image: Jim Gall
“In both plan and section, the design encouraged connection spatially and socially within the building and with other campus buildings,” Jones and Gall write in their submission. “It facilitated broad social accessibility to education and encouraged informal interactions between teaching and research.”
Simpson, the design and project architect for the building, had previously worked with Scottish architect Basil Spence on the University of Sussex campus, which was a key inspiration as a university which embraced its natural setting and an inter-disciplinary style of teaching.
Jones and Gall say the Australian Environmental Studies Building was a “building ahead of its time,” part of a generation of buildings that have provided a “robust ground” for subsequent phases of development on Australia’s bush campuses – “a late-modernist counterpoint to the iconic, brand-focused buildings now in favour.”
Speaking to the Brisbane Times, Simpson said he was furious at the university’s plans for the building he designed. “If Griffith University itself is doing what it is doing, then clearly it has no idea of the value of buildings and the potential heritage value of the buildings they initiated many years ago,” he said.
He also noted the building’s relationship with its setting had deteriorated with subsequent development. “It has been hemmed in by other, in my view, rather undistinguished and insensitive buildings. My original concept… has been totally destroyed.”
The university says it will work through heritage assessment processes before plans for the new building are finalized.
