ON CAMPUS
campusreview.com.au
Built for extroverts
University buildings and culture
should reach out to surrounding
communities to gain the benefits
of engagement and collaboration.
Robert McGauran interviewed by James Wells
G
ood campus design speaks to the place and culture in
which an institution sits, a leading architect says.
Robert McGauran, founding director of MSG Architects,
says universities need to include the broader community in
design plans in order to understand how people socialise, engage
and collaborate.
This leads to effective design when married up with the
underlying values and learning, teaching and research pedagogies
of an institution.
“The way this best manifests itself is in creating university context
where there is more deliberate engagement with the physical place
in which the university sits,” McGauran says. “Then within the next
layer, there should be much more explicit curation of the space
within the campus, considering the whole campus as a learning
environment. There must be transactional and translational spaces
that enable students of different disciplines to come together
easily and in an authentic way. You also need to create spaces
for learning in a more formal sense that provide opportunities for
people to collaborate.”
McGauran points to the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), in
the US, as a good example. He says the institution has consciously
sought to bridge the gap between the university and its host city of
Philadelphia – in both the operational and physical sense – over the
last 20 years.
“Penn has done that well, with the intermediary spaces being
around sports, start-ups, education, entertainment, recreation,
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health services, and active transport in a very effective way,” he
says. “I think it represents a very interesting case.”
Here, McGauran explains the ins and outs of good campus
design, and shares local and international examples of
best practice.
CR: Does good university design attempt to bridge the gap between
the campus and the town it sits in?
RM: Certainly. It’s an area of increased focus in many of the
universities I’ve seen around the world, and I think its good
practice for a number of reasons. For students leaving school and
undertaking higher education, universities represent a transition
from life as a child to life as an adult. Negotiating the city is an
important part of that learning as well, and students themselves
are looking to be more job ready and conscious of how the real
world works.
Considering these things is a way of ensuring that the university
facilities are well used, and that the public feels welcome to engage
with the university. It’s also a way for the students to integrate
seamlessly with the opportunities provided by the city. These are
certainly elements students report as things they value.
Besides your earlier example of Penn, what universities have bridged
this gap well?
At the University of California, Berkeley, there’s been a lot of work in
the last few years on turning it from an introverted campus into one
that engages with all of the surrounding streets. They’ve focused
on how to put some of the more socially engaging facilities, such
as galleries and so on, off the traditional campus and embedded
within the city.
At the University of British Columbia, in Canada, there’s been
an interesting move to take an isolated campus on a large area of
land and build a community at the campus. They want to build
a bridge between downtown Vancouver and the university by
instilling the surrounds of the core campus with a community of