John Wardle Architects imagined a landscape with ravines, clearings and escarpments when designing the spaces of the Learning & Teaching Building at Monash University's Clayton Campus in Melbourne, Australia.
Serving as a "new front door" to the university, the multi-faculty LTB building houses the institution's Office of Learning and Teaching as well as the Faculty of Education.

John Wardle Architects opted for a broad low-rise building, rather than a tower. This made it possible to create a horizontal field of spaces described by the firm as "an interior landscape".
The facility's interiors is a network of streets, courtyards, bridges, balconies and stairs. These are modelled on different elements of a natural landscape such as ravines, clearings, strands, perches, escarpments and amphitheatres. "Landscape, and its change over time, has been a strong theme for the site of this campus," said the studio. "The learning activities are made visible and accessible to the wider campus and community, rather than removed from the ground in a vertical structure."

The architects said that the building's low-lying design was also informed by the site's history as a suburban quarter-acre block. Originally an area of unregulated bushland, the site was transformed into a one-mile grid of roads by surveyor Eugene Bellairs in 1853.
This rapid transition from bushland to imposed surveyor's grid and eventually suburban ...