Bid to save the Australian Environmental Studies Building at Griffith University, Brisbane
“A pair of architects have launched a bid to heritage protect a 1970s university building built among the bush on Griffith University’s Nathan Campus in Brisbane, which the university plans to demolish.
Completed in 1977, the Australian Environmental Studies Building was designed by John Simpson, the then Brisbane-based director of the architectural practice John Andrews International. It was home to Australia’s first degree in environmental science and was distinguished architecturally by the way it responded to its natural setting.
The university is planning to demolish the building to make way for a $200 million, eight-storey building catering to 3,500 students. Now architects Laurie Jones and Jim Gall, who both studied at the university, have submitted an application to the Queensland Heritage Council to have the building listed. They argue it is significant as an example of accessible and interconnected campus design, marking a turning point from the closed “sandstone” universities of the past to the open “plate-glass” universities, where the teaching style aligned with the tenets of modernist architecture. …”
