500 Student Housing
2022 | Glebe | Created with Autocad and Photoshop | Antigoni Sioulas, Isabelle Fleming, Hannah Carlon
Within university student life, shared houses and their backyards have always been a site of socialising as an outlet from the constrained learning environment. In an attempt to create a student housing solution reminiscent of this laid back atmosphere, the proposed design encourages a lifestyle that allows for independent living within a communal centred strategy. The circulation and room layout takes cues from the enfilade typology. Subsequently three main degrees of privacy are formed. The private bedroom, the semi private nooks and public shared living room spaces. Unorthodoxly, circulation flows through the centre of each module of units into the next. This promotes circulatory efficiency whilst also encouraging casual and approachable meandering into public spaces.
Each module of units contains eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, a semi-private nook, and a shared living environment. The bedroom provides a space for retreat housing a bed, study space and wardrobe. A curtain can be drawn just outside the bedrooms, containing room for a seat, bench top and bathroom.
By blurring the lines between circulation and shared living, meandering is encouraged making social activity more approachable. The shared living areas outside the units vary slightly to cater to both introverted and extroverted people. Operative louvres in the flexible living areas allows for unique and controlled lighting conditions.
Cooking is an activity that brings people together. This was an important factor for consideration given that majoring of students that use Student Housing are international and are therefore likely not to know many others. As a result the kitchen spaces have been strategically placed into an undercover outdoor terrace environment that connects the two arms of units together. The intention is to create a laid back environment that replicates a backyard typology, contrasting the rigour of the housing modules. This area integrates kitchen and social spaces, allowing students to cook and eat together. External electric blinds and integrated smart heating have been utilised, providing flexibility under varying weather conditions.
Given the scale of the design and that the western boundary was lined with residential buildings, it was important that there was a softened approach to the western facade. The design steps back along the western boundary bringing in more light to the lower levels. However the intentional extension of the glulam framework maintains a sense of scale whilst still maintaining lightness. It also utilises the opportunity for additional smaller balconies. These take the opportunity to house smaller kitchen spaces catering for more introverted students.
The design utilises timber for the warmth and life it adds to Student Housing. The timber modulated scheme works in favour of this with the exposure of the wooden framing beams into the interior. This further promotes the blurring of indoor and outdoor spaces. The glulam beams and columns define the modules which each contain 4 ground floor bedrooms and 4 stacked upper floor bedrooms. The structural framework uses glulam timber combined with CLT shear walls and floors with vertical surfaces extending through the stacked apartment modules. Concrete Lifts are used as cores. The use of biological concrete allows moss to grow helping to further soften the rigorous design.
Housing 500 students, the potential for this building to quickly become quite heavy was blatant. To combat this the design softens the ground plane by elevating the housing modules on a truss system that allows for beautiful airy spaces on the ground floor. This ground floor uses the same circulation techniques of travelling through spaces to get to the next as the levels above. Taking the share house scheme to this large scale, the design encourages an energetic, social community of students.
