Education

Federation University Australia 2023 Master Plan Approved

Master planning Australia’s first cooperative University

KIRK’s Master Plan for the Federation University Australia has officially been approved.

Federation University is a leading regional university comprising multiple campuses throughout regional Victoria. Over 150 years, the University has undergone rapid expansion and witnessed seismic shifts in the higher education sector, creating the need to transform for the future.

Their bold ambition is to be Australia’s first cooperative university - to extend the student experience beyond the campus, embed community and industry opportunities within the campus experience, and create a strong, sustainable University that directly contributes to regional growth.

KIRK’s project team worked closely with Federation University to envision the campus experience of tomorrow and provide a road map to develop campus environments to enable transformation for 21st Century learning and cooperative educational models.

Design opportunities and challenges

The University comprises geographically dispersed environments, some over 100 years old. Each campus location is rich with unique opportunities to integrate landscape, cultural identity, community, township/city surrounds, and local business.

A vital component of this project involved developing a strategy for the University’s legacy real estate assets - ageing structures built for traditional learning models and unfit for contemporary sustainability standards. To address these assets, we conducted detailed space planning and assessment in parallel with master planning.

Through KIRK's master planning expertise and state-of-the-art digital modelling and computational space analysis, we were able to rapidly generate an intelligent planning solution in just over 6 months.

An iterative road map for transformation

Our master plan provides unique planning solutions for 5 regional campuses, tailored to the each site's opportunities and requirements — including consolidation and strategic additions that improve utilisation and support campus growth.

To create a vibrant and viable 21st century campus, we planned for a staged removal of redundant assets and the design of fewer, better performing buildings.

New campus additions relate with the surrounds and support multi-modal learning, cross-disciplinary collaboration, social connection, long-life and adaptive use, climate responsiveness and a celebration of the public realm.

To create a permeable 21st century campus model, we also searched for opportunities to integrate community and industry within the campus.

Key achievements:

Fast-tracked delivery to complete master planning within 4 months, and space planning within 3 months
Master Plan alignment with the University's net zero strategy
Delivered a range of project initiatives varying in scale and priority, which could be implemented in the short and long term to kickstart transformation and steadily enliven the campus experience

Find out more

We look forward to implementation and the continued evolution of Federation University Australia's Master Plan as it is brought to life.

For more on this project, see Federation University Australia campus vision.

USC Moreton Bay Campus Expansion feature in ArchitectureAU

The campus expansion is another step towards creating a thriving innovation ecosystem at The Mill at Moreton Bay. These buildings will significantly increase the space available for our teaching and research, as well as provide our students with sporting facilities and more areas for them to study, collaborate and socialise. Our main focus is to provide high quality face-to-face, interactive teaching at USC Moreton Bay and this campus expansion will help us enhance our students’ experience of attending university.

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