Monash University Woodside Building for Technology & Design by Grimshaw with Monash University

Designed through a six-year collaboration between Grimshaw and Monash University, the Woodside Building for Technology & Design is a landmark in sustainable education design. Located on Monash’s Clayton campus, 20 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, it is the largest education building in the world to achieve Passivhaus certification.

Monash University was a key partner in the design process, ensuring the project was deeply informed by the learning experience. The five-storey building is the new home for the faculties of Engineering and Information Technology; hence, it is designed as a transdisciplinary space, with conventional teaching spaces such as classrooms and lecture theatres as well as advanced manufacturing laboratories and cutting-edge technologies.

The Passivhaus design ensures the building is completely sealed off from the weather, maximising the ability to control internal conditions.

The project contributes to Monash’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2030 through an all-electric design that draws 60 per cent of its power from a solar rooftop array. The Passivhaus design ensures the building is completely sealed off from the weather, maximising the ability to control internal conditions, such as temperature and air quality, and regulate the building’s energy use. An abundance of portals and two-storey top-lit atriums ensures natural lighting is prioritised, reducing the need for artificial lighting by filtering it into classrooms through internal glass.

Channelling these impressive sustainability and pedagogical credentials, the building is a refined, almost austere, monolith on the campus. Everything about it is purposeful, nothing ornamental. “The combination of active and passive environmental strategies defines the building’s expression,” describes Grimshaw Partner Andrew Cortese. The edifice may be eye-catching, but its appearance is driven by the need to reduce the surface area relative to its internal volume, thus optimising the building’s thermal performance. Similarly, the steel louvres that orchestrate the rhythmic façade provide shade whilst permitting winter solar gain to both sides, thanks to the east-west orientation.

Views to foliage of the trees below are never far away, ensuring students experience an unbroken relationship with the outdoors.

Grimshaw proffers a muted palette that’s nevertheless rich in its honest materiality. Externally, the dark steel echoes the charcoal grey of the adjacent ironbarks, interrupted by sections of dull red reminiscent of eucalypt flowers. This motif – catching the colours of the surrounding native landscape – continues internally, with the abundant timber panelling cultivating a feeling of being immersed in nature. The learning spaces are similarly designed to evoke this feeling; views to foliage of the trees below are never far away, ensuring students experience an unbroken relationship with the outdoors.

By positioning learning alongside academic research and cutting-edge enterprise within an aspirational piece of architecture – itself at the forefront of sustainability and engineering – the project will inevitably support and inspire students to imagine new solutions in sustainable energy engineering and technology.