The Forest – The University of Tasmania’s flagship Hobart campus – is officially complete, with university staff and students now moving onsite. An official opening ceremony was held on Friday 6 February, attended by university delegates, project partners, and university staff.
Designed by Woods Bagot with landscape architecture by REALM Studio, the completed campus is an inner-city hub for learning, research, collaboration and community, with contemporary and accessible facilities for the University of Tasmania’s students and staff.
The original Melville Street site was home to heritage-listed brick warehouses dating back to 1922, when the site was used as a dry timber store and sawmill outlet. The project objectives were to revitalise, adapt and activate the site though a highly connected, masterplan that honours heritage, celebrates natural landscape, and accommodates the diverse teaching needs of the university.
The result is a highly connected campus that unifies the disparate built elements onsite with integrated landscape, through-block connections and publicly accessible thoroughfares. The design team strived to create a campus – not a building – through a masterplan that features a collection of diverse and rich interstitial spaces to meet the requirements of the university.
“We’re creating a campus, not a building, so we wanted to think about the interstitial, the relationship between zones and the quality of the spaces that you move through between buildings. We created clear navigation through the site, carving out spaces that create opportunities for the interaction of diverse users.”
As a highly flexible structure, the building’s demountable design will enable the university to adapt the interior environment as the university’s pedagogical needs change. Key design principles include a building that identifies with each of the disciplines it houses; that is warm and welcoming to staff, students, and the community; and that embraces people and their ways of working on a human scale.
As Australia’s first carbon-neutral university campus, the project includes word-class strategies for climate resilience and inclusive urban transformation, integrating solutions to address climate action, community resilience, and carbon reduction. Incorporating the adaptive reuse of existing heritage buildings, the redevelopment includes the restoration of the iconic conservatory dome, designed by Murris-Nunn and Associates in 1997.
Celebrating the confluence of architecture and landscape, the design reinstates the indoor urban forest previously housed beneath the glass dome. This forested atrium forms the civic heart of the precinct, re-establishing a pre-colonial ecosystem within the city through ethically sourced mature trees and visible water systems.
“The contemporary learning landscape is changing, with the built environment playing a vital role in the way we approach pedagogical frameworks. Flexibility, wellbeing and integration of the natural environment have a tangible impact on learning outcomes, and these principles have informed the way we curate spaces for education.”
Building from the existing structures, new additions develop upon found conditions for a campus that is both historically rich and environmentally sustainable. Contemporary spaces are organised into six discrete typologies, including: focused study zones, ‘alone together’ spaces, public collaboration areas, private collaboration areas, relaxation quarters, and places for meeting others.
The campus characterised by vibrant civic spaces, underscored by a connection to place through a design that appeals to the senses by introducing fresh air, natural light, biophilic design principles, native greening. Incorporating a strong overlay of craft and materiality, the campus design uses locally sourced materials used in their honest forms, with minimal applied finishes, leaving natural grain and textures exposed.
Retaining 60 percent of what was already onsite and targeting 40 percent less embodied carbon than comparable buildings, the project adopts a comprehensively circular strategy to building materials. This means material recovery where possible; the elimination of carbon-intensive materials; and the introduction of only sustainable materials.
New materials have been selected for their provenance and sustainability, from mass timber construction to the recycled-content carpets. At completion, the Forest Building is the largest example of a commercial use of hempcrete – a carbon-sequestering bio-composite material – in Australasia.
Now complete, the building itself will operate as an education tool through the inclusion of interpretative signage that highlight the innovative materials and construction methods that underpin the sustainable design. Didactic tools signpost the site’s history and detail decisions informing design outcomes, from material provenance to flora selection in the landscape.
The Forest has already been recognised for design excellence on a global stage, receiving the award for Future Project: Higher Education & Research at World Architecture Festival 2024 alongside the WAFX specialist award for building technology.
Media enquiries Isla Sutherland Content and Communications Manager (Australia & New Zealand)
05 Jul 24
Sydney, Australia
27 Sep 23
Hobart, Australia
02 May 23