The way we live and work is influenced by the physical environments we build. Boola Katitjin presents a world class example of how positive that influence can be.
“To me, it's really all about connections and relationships and I think because it was designed so purposely, that's really come to life,” Chanelle van den Berg, Pro Vice Chancellor First Nations, said about Murdoch University’s new building.
“The theme of relationships that we discussed throughout the design process really comes out here, because you can see your students walking through corridors, you can go and have conversations and they really connect in that way.”
It’s no accident that the expansive space – the largest timber framed building in Western Australia – has been so quickly embraced by students, staff and guests of the University.
The design team, which included Kieran Wong of The Fulcrum Agency working alongside principal architect Lyons, was acutely aware of the scale, the role the building had to play in campus life, and how it should interact with the environment around it.
“A lot of time was spent thinking about how that might work, because universities can be stressful places. They are places of study, there's exams, there's all sorts of things that are happening,” Wong said.
“In many ways, a lot of the design of the project was around how to deal with student engagement and wellbeing - and how do we kind of embed and engage and connect people to feel like they belong?
“That's a really big challenge for a lot of universities, especially in a teaching and learning building where the cohort is transient.”
This goes to the heart of the building’s biophilic design, which is about increasing people’s connection to the natural environment.
“I think biophilic design, in a way, is about designing with Country. It's a kind of connecting with Country in a more total way – in the way that I think Indigenous people talk about the Country, which is more than landscape,” Wong explained.
“So, in a building like this, a lot of attention was paid to not just the kind of building material, which is incredible, but also the way it kind of draws you out into the landscape and draws landscape in.
You get to see sun changes, wind changes, you get to feel the environment every time you cross between spaces.”
The stories of the land and the stories of the people who first cared for it were all brought into the process, van den Berg explained.
“It was really important to make sure that we were authentically engaging with Aboriginal people in that whole process because it makes this space really special.
“At the beginning, that was having consultants come walk around the land, tell those stories and then all the way through to having those relationships with Aboriginal people.
“Meaningful engagement is not just going out to Aboriginal people and saying, ‘tell us what to do’, but having that ongoing relationship and I think Murdoch did that really well.”
This approach was explored as part of the World Green Building Council’s series The Spaces That Shape Us produced by BBC Storyworks, which features Murdoch University’s Boola Katitjin.
Building the vision
Building the first of anything in a place is difficult. So, to engineer the largest mass engineered timber building ever built in WA with such a powerful vision of connectedness, the team needed to set a new precedent.
Pratik Shrestha, principal engineer from Aurecon, said it all started with understanding the material in hand.
“The first thing we did was reach out to the timber industry to really understand a simple question of here's a tree and here's the building – how do you go from A to B?” Shrestha explained.
“It sounds simple enough, but we needed to roadmap that out and look at the risks and look at the opportunities, because often that's where projects fall over.
“We all have great aspirations to do great things, but reality kicks in, budget kicks in, and all sorts of constraints kick in and projects often fall over.”
It required strong management to overcome those challenges and Shrestha said the leadership of the project team was unprecedented.
That was a big part of making this happen – collaboration across all the teams involved was absolutely fantastic.”
One of the greatest engineering challenges was the huge portal frames in the northern plaza, which Shrestha said pushed the boundaries of engineering.
“Initially we had columns throughout the plaza, but Murdoch asked us to remove them. The easy answer would have been to just leave the columns, but we thought let’s push it and see what we can do.”
Engineering calculations weren’t sufficient to prove that a 30-metre portal frame would work, so the team used it as a research opportunity.
“We built a full-scale prototype of one of these connections and broke it to pieces to understand the behaviour of the portal frame.
“As a result, we were able to achieve this amazing space that will be used by thousands of students for many years to come.”
A symbol of sustainability
Not only a model for cultural engagement and timber engineering, Boola Katitjin also sets a new benchmark for sustainability.
“It is symbolic of an effort to meet the biggest challenge we collectively face: to develop sustainable ways of living without destroying the fragile ecosystems and indeed cultures of our planet,” Dr Martin Brueckner, Pro Vice Chancellor Sustainability said.
“To do so we must be compassionate to our surroundings and continue to develop the social, environmental and technical competencies required to embrace a circular economy.
“Boola Katitjin provides a case study of that progress. A case study of cultural engagement, of sustainable design and of the exploration of materials that are central to improving our built environments.”
The building’s environmental credentials include a 450kw solar panel array, estimated to produce more than 60% of the building’s operational energy requirements at peak conditions, stormwater harvesting for grey water use in the building and more than 26,000 native plants in the surrounding land.
It all comes together to benefit those it was built for: students at a university that’s all about sustainability and inclusion.
“What I love is that the students from day one have really just owned the building,” van den Berg said.
“They’ve named it Boola and they feel really connected to it.”