Fred Chaney was generous enough to travel to the UWA campus to be interviewed by the conferrence blogger on 7th April 09.  Fred will be presenting his keynote speech: “Innovative Spaces and Places in Higher Education” on Thursday 23rd April at 1.40pm during the 2009 ATEM Student Services Centre Conference.

People may have seen your name in the conference brochure but how would you like to introduce yourself to delegates?

Well I’m an architect and director of a national architectural practice and have recently returned to Perth from Melbourne.  I’ve spent the last 10 years in our Melbourne office and through a series of happy career accidents I ended up in a growing Melbourne practice with terrific partners.  I suppose our practice is very much about a partnership. We’re called Cox Architects named after one of our senior partners, Phillip Cox, who is still extremely active in the practice.  We go by different names in different cities (Cox Howlett and Bailey Woodland in Perth), because we have different, locally based directors around Australia which allows us to reinforce our local identity.

It’s a practice that has undertaken interesting work in both the Australian marketplace and internationally.  Funnily enough, the practice’s national reputation was established in educational work in the 1960’s with Philip Cox’s work with the Presbyterian Church – which was also for us very much about defining ideas about an “Australian architecture.” Out of that came a whole lot of major public building work for which we’re now very widely known.  But all the way through what is a more than 40 year history, we have done a lot of work in education and there remains for us an innate interest in issues and ideas about educational environments.  In education we are also able to engage with client groups who are passionate about what they’re trying to do.

So tell us how an architect comes to be speaking at a Student Services’ conference?

This keynote will relate primarily to a project we’re just finishing in Melbourne that started around some ideas about a new type of student centre.  The project is also connected to the new Melbourne Model curriculum structure which of course is not unrelated to what’s now happening at UWA.

That Melbourne model raised a lot of questions about the infrastructure on campus and at a broader level it reflected questions that all universities are asking themselves about learning spaces.  Melbourne University engaged a very interesting guy that we now consider a peer and professional friend called Peter Jamieson – he formed part of a client group to help define new learning spaces for the university and to work through ideas at the theoretical level in a very interesting way for us.  He also helped work through the detail of what the learning spaces were all about.  The project also grew from ‘how can we rework an old building’ to a broader concept for a new student centre here (“but we’re not sure exactly what it’s going to be!”)  So in one sense it was a moveable feast but a really terrific vehicle for us to explore with the University how it’s trying to define and develop learning environments into the future.

You’ve mentioned early work in education, how do you think the way universities approach issues of space and buildings has changed?

I think the big thrust of the Melbourne project is how students work in groups and how they pursue self-directed learning in an environment that is not necessarily a traditional classroom.  A related issue is how you set up environments where informal gatherings of students can occur because these gatherings are of course very much part of the student learning experience.  Our specific brief was to create a series of less formal learning spaces and, interestingly, how we also create outdoor learning spaces – which is an interesting challenge sometimes given the Melbourne climate!  The combination of refurbished internal and external spaces and ‘busting open’ established spaces and making them a much more dynamic part of the campus landscape meant that we could shape and respond better to how students operated and engaged with each other on the campus.

I think what we’re now drilling down into is at a much more human level of how people engage with each other and how is that part of education and learning.  Were very interested in our practice about public space and public life and I think Universities are ideally a microcosm of that concept – they create opportunities to engage with people in an educational setting but also more broadly in terms of living a good and engaged life!

What sorts of spaces are you involved in creating that particularly excite you or that you wish existed when you were studying?

I’ll highlight something else from our Melbourne brief – the need to do something in particular for overseas students.  The University of Melbourne has a high proportion of international students who typically live close to the campus in small, purpose-built student apartments which offer some things but not others.  One of the comments back from the University is that the campus acts as the ‘living room’ for those students.  The University was also very concerned about the question of how we keep people on campus when students are more likely to drop in and out but not necessarily stay around between classes.  The University was quite properly saying that they wanted to keep people on campus because there’s value in sharing experiences with other students.  We were very interested in how we could create spaces that were literally a living room for students and I’m happy to say that the spaces are working like that in Melbourne.  The University is being pretty liberal in how it allows students to use the space – I’ve wandered through there in recent times and seen students kipping out on big sofas which can be seen as a very passive use of space but I think it’s great that students feel a sense of belonging and consider themselves “at home.”

What does the conference theme of ‘changing expectations’ mean to you?

I guess there are very clear expectations from the Universities about what they want to do – certainly wanting to be competitive in a competitive market.  Universities are recognising that good buildings and good environments are part of what they can do to attract students – so that’s clearly a key element that we can contribute to.  Secondly, in a really good way, Universities are quite focussed on being part of developing interesting, able, agile, broad-minded and decent human beings – and it’s reassuring to see a willingness to explore how the right environment can allow students can engage with each other.  I think then that we’re playing an important role in helping achieve these outcomes.

What can delegates expect from your Keynote presentation later this month?

Some of the other sorts of things I’ll be talking about at the conference relate to how we can reutilise existing building fabric.  This is an interesting question for Universities, most of which have very significant existing and often outdated building stock.  In this sense they reflect broader challenges in cities of offices and apartment buildings and how they adapt existing structures over time.  That’s something we experienced in the Melbourne project – how can give new life, especially a rich, exciting new life to existing spaces.  The University of Melbourne has developed a long-running and successful program of making more liveable external spaces which I think is a critical part of how universities can think creatively about their existing buildings.  This can lead to many happy accidents – the existing building fabric offers opportunities that wouldn’t exist if we were to knock it down and start again.  This idea of reutilising spaces has also been undercooked at the environmental level.  I think that’s being redressed now in terms of green star ratings.  There are, as everyone would appreciate enormous energy costs in knocking down buildings and starting again – material costs as well as energy costs so it’s fundamentally environmentally sound to reutilise old buildings.  I’m very interested in how you do that well and very interested in how you create much better and more energy-efficient environments.