Civic and Sustainable Monumentality Catalog

Civic and Sustainable Monumentality

UNSW, Eora Sydney

Anita B. Lawrence Centre

Formerly The Red Centre

1998 — 2023

Celebrating 25 Years

We pay our respects to the Bidjigal peoples who are the Custodians of the lands on which the Anita B. Lawrence Centre sits. We acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the First Australians, whose lands, winds and waters we all now share, and pay respect to their unique values, and their continuing and enduring cultures which deepen and enrich the life of our nation and communities.

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Climate and Sustainable Monumentality’ on view at the University of New South Wales Kensington Campus, April 20 — June 2023

An exhibition in partnership between; UNSW Built Environment, fjcstudio and the Australian Institute of Architects

With thanks to contributors;

Adam Haddow, Alicia McCarthy, Andrew Chung, Elizabeth Carpenter, Ella Van Dort, Erika Volk, Haico Schepers, James Weirick, Kenny Yeak, Marion Burgess, Philip Oldfield, Phillip Pham, Richard Francis-Jones and Spirit Pupo.

Models by Kinkfab and Michael Lewarne

Photography by John Gollings, Brett Boardman and Max Dupain

Paperback, 68 pp

270 × 260 mm

Published by fjcstudio (formerly fjmtstudio)

Printed in Sydney

Introduction

Philip Oldfield — Head of School, UNSW, Built Environment

The Anita B Lawrence Centre (formerly the Red Centre) has been home to UNSW Built Environment since 1997. Today, the building accommodates over 100 staff, and almost 3,000 students across Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City Planning, Computational Design, Industrial Design and Construction Management and Property programs.

Across the quarter of a century that the Anita B Lawrence Centre has been our home, it is difficult to put into words the magnitude of what has taken place within - the tens of thousands of student projects designed, the hundreds of books written, the diverse and impactful classes delivered. During Covid, like so many others, we often worked from home in 2020 and 2021. Then, in 2022, while other Schools at UNSW returned to campus, we again worked away from the building, while the façade and computer labs were refurbished. As we return to the building in 2023 then, it is wonderful to see it fully occupied yet again; our double-height studios full of creativity and models, the corridors bustling with discussion and discourse, queues for the elevators before morning class.

It is important to reflect too on the pioneering sustainable credentials of the building, developed by architects MGT with Ove Arup. These extend not only to passive design, natural ventilation and daylighting, but also to the adaptive reuse and integration of the original architecture building on the University Mall. This concern for the environment, embodied in the building, is also reflected in the commitment we have as a School to ensure our students graduate with the skills and knowledge to lead the fight against climate change in their respective disciplines. It’s fitting that today, one of our final year architecture studios is exploring how we can adaptively reuse other existing buildings on the UNSW Kensington Campus.

Our return to the building after three years away, and it’s official renaming to the Anita B Lawrence Centre, after the University’s first woman architecture graduate and the first woman to receive a University Medal, provides us with an opportunity to celebrate both the role the building has played in the success of the School, and Anita Lawrence’s trailblazing contribution to society. I hope this catalogue and the associated exhibition allows us to do.

The Red Centre is a sustainable tour de force that challenged the environmental standards for Australian campus architecture. Four features determine the character of this work: one - the formal continuity of the linear massform, which is emphasized by long, shallow windows; two - a partially opened, reinforced concrete structural frame with cantilevers carrying the body of the building throughout its length; threethe expression of the building’s services through clusters of metal intake and exhaust tubes on the roof; finally, four—marked emphasis on an existing pedestrian route running alongside and branching off to access pre-existing academic buildings lying behind its frontage.

Kenneth Frampton Architecture as Material Culture

Civic and Sustainable Monumentality

Richard Francis-Jones — Design Director, fjcstudio

Some argue that we are living in an unbalanced state of relativity which cannot be expressed with a single intensity of purpose. It is for that reason, I feel, that many of our confreres do not believe we are psychologically constituted to convey a quality of monumentality to our buildings.

Louis Kahn, Monumentality (1944)

This building designed in 1994 and constructed in multiple phases, aspired to the monumental. A monumentality that strived to join, connect and above all make civic form and public spaces that coalesced and distilled the urban form of the campus. It was an architecture that also sought an innovative and ambitious embrace of natural passive sustainable systems of environmental control and mediation. The elements and systems of sustainability were both integral to the conception and expressive subjects of this architectural monumentality.

An International Centre, School of Mathematics and the varied Schools of the Faculty of the Built Environment are bought together and unified in a shared civic form that defines key public spaces of the entire campus. This unity is embodied in the monumental terra-cotta screen, that suppressed the expression and scale of the individual academic office through alternate rows of vision slots and light shelf clearstories. This screen is a subtractive formalism that is cut and folded to define the primary public spaces of Science Square and International Square.

The unity established through the long terracotta screen also enables the heterogeneity of the complementary southern assembly of diverse additive formal elements that include the adaptation and integration of existing buildings as well as the articulate expression of studios, classrooms, circulation and identity. The unity, weight, depth and civic form of the terra-cotta screen are complemented by the individuality of the flushed glazed metal and concrete frames with projecting shading systems, stairways and expressive thermal flues.

The Red Centre now the Anita B Lawrence Centre remains a project of architectural duality, that seeks to join a campus while also giving the elements of pedagogy, collegiality and sustainability independent form and the ability to adapt and change.

Anita B. Lawrence

This text is based on the Obituary for Anita Lawrence prepared by Honorary Associate Professor Marion Burgess for Acoustics Australia, March 2021.

In April 2023, the Red Centre was renamed the Anita B. Lawrence Centre, after the University’s first woman architecture graduate and the first woman to receive a University Medal.

Anita Barbara Greenslade was born in Hertfordshire, UK, in 1930 before arriving in Australia with her parents in 1946. Anita achieved many notable ‘firsts’. Not only was she the first female graduate from the Architecture Department at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) but she was the first woman to receive a University Medal from UNSW when in 1955 she was granted a Bachelor of Architecture with First Class Honours. After working at the CSIRO she joined the UNSW academic staff and completed a 32-year teaching and research career specialising in acoustics, ultimately achieving an Associate Professor position.

In the early 1970s she initiated the first postgraduate course in acoustics in Australia at UNSW – the Graduate Diploma in Architectural Acoustics, which was subsequently upgraded to MSc (Acoustics). Many Australian practitioners obtained their broad understanding of acoustics by undertaking part or all of that course.

Anita was chair of the Standards Australia Committee which produced the first Australian Standard on environmental noise. In 1989, AS 1055 detailed not only measurement procedures but also provided guidance on typical noise levels based on land-use planning and time-of-day which were used as the basis for most environmental noise regulations at that time. She also played a pivotal role in developing numerous other Australian acoustics standards.

In 1964 a number of visionaries initiated the Australian Acoustical Society (AAS) - incorporated as a public company in 1971 - and one of them, Anita, became the first female on its committee. She maintained a strong involvement with the AAS, holding many positions on both the Divisional Committee and on Federal Council, including being President for a term from 1981.

Anita strove to increase the awareness of Australian research and achievements by working on committees to host International Acoustics Conferences in Australia. The first was the International Congress on Acoustics held in Sydney in 1980. She was the chair of the successful Internoise conference held on the UNSW Campus in 1991. Subsequently she

was the first female board member of the I-INCE (International Institute of Noise Control Engineering), serving on their board from 1992 through to 1998.

Anita was tireless in her quest to develop a wide understanding in architecture and the building industry of the importance of good acoustic design. She was a believer that all built environment professionals should understand and value the practice of acoustics, saying “a person’s experience of a building can be drastically altered by bad acoustics – it’s imperative that architects, builders and landscape architects understand the importance of achieving optimal sound in a room or building.” In 1970, Elsevier published her first book Architectural Acoustics – a slender book that provides a comprehensive explanation of all aspects of acoustics related to buildings; not only did she write the text but she also produced all illustrations in the book.

During her career at UNSW, she was awarded a number of research grants, predominantly in relation to environmental noise and especially road traffic noise. In 2015 she made a generous bequest to UNSW Built Environment to establish and fund the Anita Lawrence Chair in High Performance Architecture. Then, in her will following her death on 6 April 2019, she bequeathed a further $2.3m to be specifically allocated to enhance teaching and research in acoustics and the built environment. This generous grant is being used to support PhD students with on average one scholarship being offered annually.

Anita was an inspiration to so many and leaves an outstanding legacy to the national and international built environment and acoustics communities. The naming of the home of UNSW Built Environment in her honour is a celebration of her achievements and her trailblazing contribution to UNSW and our broader society.

The Polemical Urbanism of the Red Centre

James Weirick — Emeritus Professor James Weirick served as Professor of Landscape Architecture at UNSW, 1991-2020, Head of the School of Landscape Architecture, 1991-1995; and Director of the Graduate Program of Urban Development & Design, 2007-2020. In the 1990s, he was a member of the Faculty committee which oversaw the commissioning of the Red Centre.

The Red Centre and Scientia, designed by Romaldo Giurgola and Richard Francis-Jones in the late 1990s, transformed the Kensington Campus of the University of New South Wales by filling the lost spaces of its central axis with urban architecture of remarkable distinction.

The first section of the axis was created by the University’s first Professor of Landscape Architecture Peter Spooner as a tree-lined pedestrian mall extending east from Anzac Parade. For decades, it petered out in a series of car parks around the Science Theatre, conspicuously missing a terminating element on the skyline beyond.

The ceremonial Scientia building, commissioned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the University in 1999, resolved the termination of the vista by breaking the classical rule of never placing a column in the centre of a composition. Scientia features just such a column, or more accurately, a central line of columns. Each branched at the top as an abstracted ‘Tree of Knowledge’ these central elements take the eye to the centre of the axis, away from the weakness and mediocrity of the flanking, cream-brick Engineering buildings of the 1960s.

The Red Centre, however, was the decisive move in giving the Spooner axis spatial resolution and dramatic presence. Its block-long terracotta façade, flame red and inflected in response to its internal functions, stands out as a statement of institutional power.

North facing, highlighted by the sun, with deep-set fenestration in horizontal bands stepped in response to the first rise of the terrain, the Red Centre façade was a master stroke. It was a challenging, highly creative response to the 1991 campus master plan by David Chesterman, which sought to give coherence to the spread of 1960s buildings across the Lower Campus with space-defining, infill structures forming squares, courtyards and pedestrian ways.

As a polemical work, the Red Centre is the closest we have in Australia to an exercise in Neo-Rationalism, a critical distillation of pure form and armatures of force in the manner of Italian Tendenza, the urban architecture of Rossi, Aymonino, Gregotti, and its antecedents in Mussolini’s Italy.

For Romaldo Giurgola this can be interpreted as a return to his roots from the unfortunate post modernism of the New Parliament in Canberra, a return to the concerns of his architectural education at Piacentini’s Università di Roma La Sapienza and his years with Adalberto Libera in the 1940s. For Richard Francis-Jones, the Red Centre heralded an approach to form-giving based on the clear, logical assemblage of elements that has become the hallmark of his practice.

The Red Centre was designed to accommodate three university functions – new studios and offices for the Faculty of Built Environment, new accommodation for the School of Mathematics in the re-purposed 1960s Built Environment building which stood mid-block, and accommodation for an International Student Office.

In terms of architectural elements, the terracotta façade unified these disparate components and rationalised the somewhat Scandinavian Old Main Building of 1951 and its more prosaic Newton Building extension into a four-sided ‘perimeter block’ with a presence on the central axis.

The terracotta element was more than a mere façade, it was an ‘inhabited wall’ accommodating three floors of academic offices in a stacked cellular structure. A double-height cut in this wall in the Built Environment section made an urban room for a new Science Square overlaid on the central axis across from the only heroic work of mid-twentieth century modernism on campus, the International Style Science Theatre, Dalton Building and Chemistry School complex designed by the NSW Government Architect, 1957-1962.

The slab block of the Chemistry School, in its original metal and glass cladding before recent works, related visually across the new Science Square to a similar metal and glass slab conceptually slid behind the terracotta inhabited wall to signal the presence of design studios on Levels 1, 5 & 6 of the Built Environment Faculty (and seminar rooms on the intervening levels).

The terracotta replacement of the front façade of the 1960s Built Environment building for the School of Mathematics was a powerful gesture, essential in urbanistic terms, but it did eliminate the ‘Sydney School’ aspects of the original concrete frame, pre-cast sun hoods, manganese brick panels of the brutalist design by McConnel, Smith & Johnson with its resonances from the early design teaching of the Architecture School.

At the eastern and western ends of the Red Centre, the louvred, tower-like elements in aluminium and glass of the Built Environment stair and the International Student Office, together with the roof stacks of the ventilation system, further referenced the machine aesthetic of the Chemistry School.

The Red Centre is a commanding work of urban architecture. As a critical contribution to university culture in Australia, however, it is essentially a work of branding and image-making from the socio-political turn of the 1990s to commercialization and competitive positioning across the higher education sector of the nation.

Behind the image, the academic reality of the Red Centre is another story, although this is more the legacy of misguided managerialism than design moves. During construction, for example, the separate, long-established Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Planning and Building in the Faculty of Built Environment, for which it was designed, were eliminated, with long-term effects on collegiality and identity. In a tragic cost-cutting exercise, the Architecture Library, with a collection dating back to the Sydney Technical College of the 19th century and a 50-year archive of research theses, was also eliminated, eviscerating the intellectual core of the Faculty. Located on the ground floor just in from the central axis, with circular skylights evoking Aalto’s Viipuri Library, and furnished with custom-made tables and cabinets, the Architecture Library was a beautiful, life-enhancing, inspirational space –its destruction was a disaster.

Re-named the Anita B. Lawrence Centre in honour of the first woman graduate in architecture from the University of New South Wales, and distinguished member of the Faculty, Associate Professor Lawrence (1930-2021), the Red Centre is entering a new era. Its urban presence on the Kensington Campus is assured. Given its new name, it is time for its strangely empty, impersonal character as an academic environment to be addressed, with the creative endeavours and research achievements of students and staff made manifest in new, challenging ways.

References:

‘Architecture School, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia,’ UME, no.5, pp.24-33.

Chesterman, D., 2005, ‘Restructuring of the University of New South Wales,’ Urban Design International, vol.10 nos 3-4, pp.199-213.

Luscombe, D. (ed.) 2001, UNSW Campus: a guide to its architecture, landscape & public art, UNSW Press, Sydney.

A Sustainable Paradigm

Haico Schepers — Arup

Thermal flues are heated by the sun amplifying stack affect ventilation

Levels 5 and 6 studio spaces cross ventilated

Teaching spaces ventilated through vertical shafts connected to thermal flues

Office ventilation through trickle vent and openable window combined with high level internal louvres draw air from outside and ventilated through corridor.

Level 1 and 2 air drawn into vertical shafts connected to thermal flues

Level 1 studio spaces cross ventilated and connected to stack effect ventilation through void to level 2

Resource space ventilated skylight

The Red Centre building was a pioneering project that was ahead of its time. While many buildings constructed today still employ energy-intensive systems that isolate the building from its surroundings, the Red Centre embraced a natural systems approach in its design.

The Red Centre building, designed by MGT(Sydney) now fjcstudio (FrancisJones Carpenter) in the 1990s, was one of the first green buildings of its kind. It was designed with a focus on natural ventilation and passive systems to provide a comfortable environment for occupants. In this article, we explore how the building compares to contemporary sustainable design principles, and what lessons can be learnt from its design.

Arup conducted a high-level review of the building’s performance compared to its original design intent. The review focused on three objectives: establishing how the original design intent for passive systems is being used, reviewing the current system performance associated with changes in occupancy patterns, and providing a high-level comparison of how a contemporary building would be designed.

Arup reviewed their own archives and the archives of UNSW to understand the initial design intent. They also interviewed building users and assessed temperature monitoring reports to identify common comfort issues within the building. The Red Centre building was designed as a passive building to provide comfortable conditions for occupants for the majority of the time. The building employs several passive design strategies to improve natural ventilation and regulate internal temperatures. Wind-driven stack ventilation is located centrally throughout the building to enhance natural ventilation. The building also utilizes exposed mass in walls and soffits to absorb heat during the day and release it at night, thereby regulating internal temperatures. Manually operated trickle vents are installed in spaces to provide minimal background ventilation, and ceiling fans are installed throughout the building to improve comfort. Control of sunlight penetration is achieved using a combination of external shades, fixed shades, internal light shelves, and fabric blinds, which are automated or occupant-controlled depending on the season.

The passive ventilation system is intended as a hybrid of automatic and manual operation. The automatic aspects use air relief dampers with night flush control, which are automatically operated by the building Facilities Management team for the general building. Individual areas were manually operated by the occupants of the space to suit individual preferences and comfort levels. In addition to this ventilation strategy, the building relies considerably on the use of exposed mass in the soffits and walls to regulate internal temperatures. The intent is to purge the heat absorbed in the mass during the night and then to absorb the heat gained during the day.

These principles apply through out the building, however, there is a different passive performance approach for each of the specific spaces, which include offices, office access corridors, classrooms, general corridors, and western studios.

North-facing offices are provided with a light shelf, ceiling fan, a trickle ventilator for fresh air, and a user operable window. Heating is available on request to staff supplied by a low-wattage electric heater that they could use under their desk. All these items would be considered best practice today. However, contemporary best practice would look to superinsulate the walls and ensure air leakage testing of the façade in order to ensure no uncontrolled heat gain or loss. In addition, trickle vents might be automated. One of the key learnings for these advanced naturally vented buildings, when multiple people use a space, is that there is often a diffusion of knowledge in how to operate the building, so a form of automatic override is commonly considered.

The classrooms are designed to utilise cross ventilation and are ventilated directly into dedicated thermal flues. Dampers are fitted to these common floor flues and are controlled by the central management system, however, the air inlet louvres are manually controlled. The southfacing facades give excellent diffuse daylight for the majority of the year with blinds utilised for low-angle sun in summer. These blinds sometimes interact with the glazed ventilation louvres. A contemporary design would consider how to automate these louvres as the student body does not intuitively know how the system works. We might also consider making the louvres opaque to avoid blind interfacing.

Initial passive design intent

Vent stack to assist natural ventilation based on wind driven pressure differences.

Louvres open unless privacy is required

Exposed thermal mass and night purging

Ceiling Fans

Light shelf for daylight and view window

ventilation

Operable casement window

Passive Systems Optimisation for latest standards

The design intent would be the same but with the optimization of smart air quality sensors to automate the trickle ventilation, and the improvement of facade air leakage for improvement in winter conditions.

Phase change material to provide high heat adsorption to trickle vent

Air tightness testing of the façade to ensure winter heat loss is not an issue

Trickle vent to be an automated mechanical damper installed and commissioned by the mech contractor

Air quality sensor controls trickle ventilation

Air quality and temperature data sensors captured by WIFI and used to optimize predict control of passive systems and fresh air.

Acoustic plenum used to attenuate air flow path into common areas rather than high level opening

Super Insulated Wall cavity

Trickle

The design intent was that the heat generated by the occupants should generally be sufficient for these spaces. It appears that heating was considered but deleted as a cost-saving measure.

The design studios were designed to utilise cross ventilation with a combination of aluminium ventilation louvres and glass louvres at both high and low levels. It was the intent that these openings were controlled by the building supervisor but may also be opened and closed by the building occupant. This override function is now implemented on most advance naturally ventilated buildings. The west façade used adaptive external shading and overall the building has a window-to-wall ratio that is similar to the ratios required by the current construction codes.

The Red Centre building was a pioneering project that was ahead of its time. While many buildings constructed today still employ energy-intensive systems that isolate the building from its surroundings, the Red Centre embraced a natural systems approach in its design. Today’s contemporary highperforming buildings would now maybe opt for a hybrid approach they would still utilise the principles of Red Centre’s facade and fabric design. Whilst the fundamental principles of passive design employed in the Red Centre building might remain unchanged, the lessons learned over the past 20 years would focus on more advanced installation, testing, and control of systems. In particular, there would be stricter control over uncontrolled heat gains and losses, and greater integration of automated systems. The current trend to implement hybrid conditioning that supplements natural ventilation would install efficient heating and cooling systems to improve comfort in specific areas. It is therefore worthwhile considering how these innovations could be integrated into the Red Centre Building to re-establish it as a leader in natural systems engineering.

The Red Centre is a bold structure, defining the university’s central axis with an assertive, machine aesthetic. Its monumental facade of terracotta tiles and reinforced concrete structure extends the linearity of the University Mall and announces a strong civic identity to Science Square. The building is a proud exhibition of its passive environmental systems - its day-lighting, thermal control and ventilation. The thermal flues that crown the building draw air through the offices and classrooms to expel heat. An independent ‘breathing’ facade clad in terracotta tiles unifies the public face of the building while shading the concrete wall behind. The massive concrete structure is an expression of monumentality that also acts as thermal mass to absorb excess heat-loads.

Desley Luscombe

UNSW Campus A Guide to its Architecture, Landscape and Public Art, 2001.

Construction Cross Section at Library

ACC Aluminum column cladding

ACS Continuous acoustic seal (Black)

ADB Aluminium draft baffles (continuous)

ADH Aluminium deflection head

AFC Aluminium Framing (centre glazed)

AIP Aluminium infill profile (continuous)

ALF Aluminium sub-framing

AOP Aluminium-framed openable glazed panel

APC Aluminium composite sheet cladding panel

BCB Bookshelf/cladding beam

BM Bird mesh

CA Carpet

CD Cable duct

CPZ Capping profile zincalume finish

F Flashing

FFL Finished floor level

IN Insulation

LVA 50 Openable aluminium louvre (50mm)

MIC MDF infill continuous (black)

MRP Membrane roof system (pavers over)

MSC Steel channel (paint finish)

OFP Off-form concrete (paint finish)

SJ Sealed joint

SSF Folded stainless-steel flashing and sealant

TCP Terracotta cladding panel (horizontal corner profile)

TCP 1 Terracotta cladding panel (horizontal corner profile)

UAS Upper aluminium sill

The Red Centre ... was the decisive move in giving the Spooner axis spatial resolution and dramatic presence. Its block-long terracotta façade, flame red and inflected in response to its internal functions, stands out as a statement of institutional power.

North facing, highlighted by the sun, with deep-set fenestration in horizontal bands stepped in response to the first rise of the terrain, the Red Centre façade was a master stroke. It was a challenging, highly creative response to the 1991 campus master plan.

MODELS

James Weirick

The Polemical Urbanism of the Red Centre

The Red Centre building was a pioneering project that was ahead of its time. While many buildings constructed today still employ energyintensive systems that isolate the building from its surroundings, the Red Centre embraced a natural systems approach in its design.

Haico Schepers A Sustainable Paradigm

Red Centre

H13, University of New South Wales

Kensington NSW Australia

Completed: October 1998

Client: University of New South Wales

mgt Sydney (Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp)

Richard Francis-Jones, Jeff Morehen, Romaldo Giurgola, Johnathan Redman, Angelo Korsanos, David Conley, Rhiannon Morgan, Elizabeth Carpenter, Nicky Ross, Jane Davie, Burt Greer, Ramin Jahromi

Structural & Services: Ove Arup & Partners

Cost: Project Cost Planning

Landscape: Tract Consultant

Building Surveyor: Trevor Howse & Associates

Contractor: Hansen Yuncken