UQ Advanced Engineering Building

AEB establishes a new front door to the UQ St Lucia campus, Brisbane Australia. The UQ Great Court occupied a once neglected site that overlooks a large, introduced lake and an array of established bunya pines. The building addresses and reclaims the lakeside ecology while engaging with the existing neighbouring buildings. The AEB further connects to Jocks Road, establishing newly activated pedestrian corridors and mediating the threshold conditions of urban versus landscape. Expressive and bold formal gestures are balanced by rich materiality and palatable scale that define the transient nature of the street to the north and ‘internal street’ pedestrian experience.

KIRK was appointed as Architect for the $130 million Advanced Engineering Building (AEB) via the successful entry to a limited design competition in 2009. The winning design for the AEB, provided an exciting and transformative opportunity for research, innovation, and collaboration within an integrated engineering precinct.

AEB was designed to be an active building; expressive, interactive, transparent, flexible, and sustainable in nature and to stimulate innovation and learning. Multiple modalities of learning, demanded by the transformation of UQ Engineering Education, have been facilitated by a simple, distilled building ‘parti.’ The various spatial typologies and building programs, are separated by an internal circulation ‘street,’ which promote the cross-pollination of ideas and learning.

AEB sets a new benchmark in climatic design by utilising passive and low energy active systems. The intent for the AEB was to prioritise the passive over the mechanical – to harness nature rather than work against it. Brisbane has a very benign sub-tropical climate where almost 70% of the year is comfortable. Singapore, comparatively, is tropical and only has 2 days a year that are comfortable.

The humble auditorium must work hard – much harder than before. The AEB Auditorium is completely unique in that we reconceptualised its purpose and its operability. KIRK have a long history in the film and television industry where all spaces were made with a sense of drama.

The AEB Auditorium was conceived as a flagship space for how the didactic pedagogy of the conventional auditorium could be transformed to one built around a performance-based mode.

The last thing we wanted was another “black box” that assumed a very dry singular didactic mode. The beautiful lake setting presented an opportunity for a living and active backdrop to each presentation through a fully glazed façade. The use of a high-performance glass façade, carefully oriented to avoid unwanted glare.

AEB has challenged the traditional concept of the university workplace, with fewer closed cellular spaces and a central atrium that is the heart of the building. AEB has facilitated the transformation of engineering education through all aspects of research, postgraduate training and undergraduate education. The themes drawn from this potential are a Working Building, a Transparent Building, an Expressive Building, an Interactive Building, a Flexible Building, a Sustainable Building.

AEB was an exploration of how renewable materials such as timber should be utilised to demonstrate their relevance to contemporary large-scale construction projects. MET or Mass Engineered Timber (Australian Glulam technology) was utilised for the façade and roof structure of the large auditorium.

The bespoke terracotta facade acts as a mitigation tool to reduce direct solar radiation and resultant heat load on the building. The terracotta facade allows for protected louvre openings which provide naturally cooled ventilation to learning and office spaces in all weather conditions.

The fenestrated façade pattern was designed in vertical modules, orientated to direct views to the lake and to minimise direct solar radiation and glare to achieve a targeted solar penetration value. The terracotta modules are also strategically positioned to optimise daylight levels for interior workspaces and cross-ventilation. The tangles play an important role in creating an ambient display of shadows inside the workspaces. Each vertical module was individually craned into place.

AEB has an 800-mm thick reaction wall in the structure's laboratory.

The Live Building Concept, introduced by KIRK, is integrated into the design of AEB where the building itself is a living laboratory and provides learning and research opportunities both as a design and construction project and as a completed project. The building itself provides a research and teaching opportunity in engineering and sustainability. Instruments were integrated into built elements to allow real-time monitoring of its structural and climatic performance. AEB has thereby become a learning tool, the study of which is now a part of the curriculum. The live building concept demonstrates our ability to provide unique and project-specific ideas to further the transformative opportunities of a project for a University.

An interactive ‘internal street’ fosters the circulation between various teaching and learning spaces and allows for the ‘crossing of paths’ between staff and students enabling a rich manifestation of interaction and learning. Planning relationships and adjacencies provide and integrate flexible active-learning spaces with laboratories, allowing for progressive teaching. Program is located and displayed in an explanatory nature, linking the program horizontally and vertically creating a sense and process of discovery.

KIRK also promoted the idea of the ‘living building,' where the in-between spaces are as important as the dedicated teaching and learning areas. Every communal hub and breakout space (including external areas) is seen as a potential learning environment. Custom CMS Electracom Floor Boxes were used throughout the building to provide easy access to power, data and AV.