A 'next generation' collaborative learning environment
designed by Lovell Chen for the Graduate School of Business (GSB)
at RMIT University, Melbourne, will commence construction
by the middle of the year.

Two lecture theatres, five classrooms, a multi-purpose hall and an informal student lounge are among the spaces that will be configured to accommodate the levels of adaptability required of leading edge contemporary learning spaces.

An additional layer to the challenge is that all of this is to be accommodated within Emily McPherson College, a neoclassical structure built as the School of Domestic Economy in 1926.

The building's new use will be most evident from the rear, which will be reconfigured to include a glazed 'street' at ground level, with new lecture theatres above and below.

Lovell Chen developed designs for the new GSB in association with Associate Professor Peter Jamieson, Office of the DVC (Academic) RMIT, Learning Environment Design consultant.

[ illustration: Lovell Chen ... reconfigured elevation, Emily McPherson College ]

Lovell Chen is updating the Conservation Management
Plan for Melbourne's Station Pier, a heritage place with
a rich and varied history.

Gold prospectors, military personnel and post-War migrants are just some of the thousands of people who have arrived and departed from the Port Melbourne landmark since 1853.

As Melbourne's principal cargo handling facility until the 1950s, it is also intimately associated with the city's economic history. Today Station Pier is a destination for international cruise vessels, and the mainland hub for ferry services to Tasmania.

Since the 1850s, Station Pier, and its predecessor Railway Pier (1853-1922), has consistently evolved in response to the needs of its users. In its present form it comprises physical fabric from a variety of development phases, including around 100 piles dating to the 1850s.

[ photos: Adam Mornement ]

A collection of original drawings by Melbourne practice
Seabrook & Fildes — later Seabrook, Fildes & Hunt, and Seabrook, Hunt & Dale — has been catalogued by Lovell Chen. The drawings were acquired by a member of our staff and have now been donated to the Picture Collection at the State Library of Victoria (SLV).

The collection spans a 25-year period from the late-1930s to the early-1960s, during which time Norman Seabrook (1906-78), who went into partnership with Alan Fildes (1909-56) in 1936, established himself among the leading lights of modern architecture in Australia.

Seabrook's design for the MacRobertson Girls' High School, in Albert Park (1934), inspired by Dutch architect Willem Dudok, was one of the earliest examples of modern functionalist architecture in Australia. Drawings of the largest rural example of the Dudok idiom, a New Town Hall for Warracknabeal (1939), are among the collection donated to the SLV.

Pictured is a perspective of a shopping centre proposed for Church Street, Brighton, Victoria (1957), from the Seabrook & Fildes Architectural Drawings Collection.

[ photo: Lovell Chen ]

Our heritage team is undertaking a review and update
of previous conservation management reports for Melbourne's historic and popular Treasury and Fitzroy Gardens.

The adjacent green spaces are legacies of the ring of public reserves that were established around the city's central business district during the nineteenth century, reflecting the contemporary belief in the moral and health benefits of public gardens at a time when industrial cities were often squalid, unsanitary environments.

Both gardens were laid out and developed under the supervision of Clement Hodgkinson, Deputy Surveyor-General and later Assistant Commissioner of the Lands and Survey Department.

As well as retaining much of their original path systems, the gardens also include significant plantings and collections of nineteenth and twentieth century buildings. Fitzroy Gardens is home to Captain Cook's cottage, the Tudor Village and the Spanish Revival-style Conservatory.