“It was surrounded by other, in my opinion, rather uncharacteristic and insensitive buildings,” said the award-winning architect.
“My original concept [to lure students into new ways of thinking] It was completely destroyed.”
Mr. Simpson is angry with the university’s top management for their building plans.
“If Griffith University itself is doing what it does, it clearly has no idea of the value of the buildings and the potential heritage value of the buildings they started many years ago.”
The university’s vice-chancellor and president, Professor Carolyn Evans, said she is aware of the heritage application to protect the original Environmental Science Building.
The original Australian Environmental Studies building was designed to blend in with the bush environment.credit:Jim Gal
She said the university has examined the heritage aspects of the building and will work through the application process for heritage inclusion before finalizing plans for the new building.
Professor Evans said: “Staff and students are very excited about the new building as it will mean that they are learning and working in a world-class facility that will replace more of the older accommodation.”
“We spent a lot of time in the design phase of this project to ensure that the building would meet the needs of our staff and students who support globally recognized research, teaching and learning.”
She said the move was part of a $1 billion infrastructure plan – announced in 2019 before COVID-19 – to close the Mount Gravat campus and focus on the Nathan campus and a new CBD campus for 3,500 students above the new Rome Street station by 2027.
The two architects who introduced the Heritage app say the original Australian Environmental Studies Building should be added to the Queensland Heritage List because it has developed a sense of ‘sustainability’ for cost-benefit analysis and decision-making.
Laurie Jones and Jim Gall – both former students – say the original building represented a shift away from “sandstone universities” to “glass-panel universities”.
As a founding facility on a planned campus for the state’s Third University, and home to Australia’s first interdisciplinary studies in environmental sciences, it marks a turning point in the 1970s in traditional ideas of ‘sandstone universities’ to ‘panel universities’, where teaching methods are aligned with architecture. Modernism”.
A Change.org petition was also launched to support the Heritage application.
“Is teaching environmental sciences and sustainability at Griffith University valuable when the university cannot transition from materialism, consumerism, and penchant for new things and technologies that will soon be out?” she says.