Building the Future: How a London-Based Studio Designed a Visonary Architecture School

If there’s one word that describes the Abedian School of Architecture at Bond University in Queensland, Australia, it’s “open”. With very few interior walls, there’s nothing but air between the majority of its studios, lecture halls and pin-up corners. All these spaces occur over, around and on top of each other, slipping past themselves through a free-flowing interior defined by giant, curved concrete “scoops” that rise to the full height of the building.

In addition to its open floor plan, every building detail, down to the furniture, was meticulously considered by the architects of London-based CRAB Studio. CRAB had the rare opportunity with this project to design for their own profession — or more accurately, for the future of their own profession.

It’s CRAB’s vision of that future that makes Abedian the crest of the wave in a long-rising trend towards openness in architecture schools whenever new ones are built or old ones are heavily renovated. As it stands toward the extreme of this tendency — to the extent that acoustical quality could easily be called into question — the school is emblematic for a slow but growing embrace in the ethos of architecture culture that free communication and collaborative efforts are necessary to solve the design problems of our day.

In a discipline that’s long praised the power of the individual, Abedian is shouting to its students that in the future, they will need to talk to each other, work with each other and put up with each other.

In Abedian, there’s no ability to ignore the fact that the school is composed of separate studios and grade levels. It’s a near impossibility for students to avoid walking directly past the desk of someone in a different studio or class year when moving from any point in the building to another.

Working spaces stretch the length of the structure behind its feature façade, with the closest hint of a classroom separation being slight changes in floor level. The upper story of the building seems more like an oversized balcony than programmed space, but it contains more studios, classrooms and offices just the same. The only space offering physical division in the school is an open interior “street” running longitudinally through the center.

Stepping down in scale from macro design moves, the most notable interior spaces are amorphous enclaves sheltered within vertical concrete components that simultaneously address structural and environmental imperatives — but their most salient intent is a social one: completely unprogrammed, they invite meetings, seminars, discussions or debates, provide a surface for informal critiques or, most likely during the end of a term, storage for architectural collateral that is piled up over the preceding months. For any use, they possess an exhibitionist quality, opening towards the building’s only true hallway.

via Domus

Within the studios themselves — already intimate in scale and completely devoid of partitions — desks designed by CRAB are ganged together in acute formations, facing each other at close range and divided into compact chains of 3-5 students. A far cry from endless straight rows of drafting tables — more akin to a barracks — seen in many architectural schools, group associations are forged by default with this layout. The formation of tables specified in Abedian’s indiscernibly-separated studios all but ensures alliances, conferences and friendly rivalries to form between table groups.

In all, this school is brimming with efforts to thrust its students together in any way possible, but this abundance of spatial encouragement towards the value of group work begs a question of curriculum: does this new building, open now for only a few years, possess the capability to elicit change in the way architecture is traditionally taught to, and understood by, students?

via CRAB

Nearly every studio course offered by the school claims to stress the value of working in a group setting, and team dynamics are the primary focus of at least one of the university’s core classes. So does this architecture school — and many other new ones like it — reflect a move towards endemic collaboration in the formation of new design professionals at the expense of a heretofore culture of singular hero worship? Or is the design pushed by its creators inciting this potentially tectonic shift?

The answer likely contains a bit of both, but the cause for either is almost certainly born from an exponential increase in complexity seen in building construction over the last several decades. The capabilities of a single architect have long been outstripped by the buildings they’re charged to design, and it’s past time to acknowledge this reality in how future practitioners are introduced to the profession. In that sense, Abedian and other schools like it are leading the charge by telling students with the design of their learning environment that they simply can’t make architecture by themselves. Let’s hope they’re paying attention.