Bulletin

Issue: March/April 2007

40th Anniversary

Master Plan has served well

La Trobe University started with a very ambitious vision of what it wanted to become. That original vision has been reshaped over the past forty years and is reflected in its physical development.

Dr Simpson on campus

In the 1950s there was increasing recognition of the need to expand higher education. In Australia, the Federal Government began to provide matching funds to the States to build new universities. This was a new initiative as, up till that time, universities had been regarded solely as a State responsibility.

One of the first decisions of the committee appointed by the State Government to establish Victoria’s third university was the choice of site. Fifty seven potential sites were considered and 27 were inspected. In December 1964, the Bundoora site was chosen - a dairy farm attached to the Mont Park Mental Hospital which was rather bleak, swampy in the lower areas, and mostly treeless.

Roy Simpson, a partner in the firm of Yuncken Freeman Architects, was appointed Master Planner in December 1964. La Trobe was expected to start teaching its first class of around 500 students in 1967 and to have 10,000 students within a decade.

Simpson had two years to plan the overall development of the University, oversee the design of the initial campus buildings and get them constructed for those first students in early 1967.

The Bundoora site was re-imagined and re-created in a number of ways that remain clearly visible today. One is the use of water: the excavation of the ornamental lakes and the moat system through the central campus was one of the first projects. Designed for flood control, irrigation, and aesthetic pleasure, it has been a wonderful success and identifying campus feature.

A related success was the landscaping. Extensive tree plantings, mainly eucalypts, were undertaken. All who work here, study or visit are beneficiaries of that early vision.

To complement this new and very Australian environment, Simpson decided buildings would be relatively low, of uniform colour and aim to fit into the landscape. Cabling and wiring would go underground.

As originally conceived, the campus comprised a series of concentric rings, the inner ring with the library at its centre.

The first buildings constructed on the campus were the library, Glenn College and the Thomas Cherry science building. The two-level Agora in front of the library was designed as a meeting place, a ‘clustered Bohemia’ with coffee shops, food shops, banks, and other outlets.

The middle ring of the Master Plan was to consist of the colleges. The college concept was a key feature of the early University - unique in terms of Australian university experience, where colleges are purely residential.

At La Trobe, the colleges, as originally conceived, were to be much more than that: small communities of academic staff and students to break down what was felt to be the impersonal nature of the very large, older Australian universities.

Students and staff were to be attached to a college; most teaching was to be done in the colleges. What happened to this original vision? The inner core of the original plan has worked well. The library remains the focus of the life of the University and the Agora, as a ‘clustered Bohemia’ has succeeded fairly well.

The middle ring of the Master Plan has not fared so well. The ambitious college concept died early.

La Trobe students wanted a single union like students at other Australian universities. Academic staff also wanted to replicate what they were used to, namely academic departments built around specific disciplines. By the early 1970s the college concept had little support. The opening of the Student Union in 1973 serves as a physical manifestation of the demise of the college concept.

In the past two decades, there have been a number of developments that were not envisioned in the Master Plan.

One has been the growth of the University beyond its original outer perimeter. The closure of the Mont Park and the Larundel mental hospitals north of the campus was a growth opportunity seized by the University. One of the hospital buildings now houses the Michael J. Osborne Institute of Advanced Studies and a cluster of others has created virtually a second campus. This houses the Graduate School of Management and various research institutes and centres.

The other major change not envisioned in the original Master Plan was the development of regional campuses.

Neither the five across northern Victoria, nor the downtown Melbourne campus - which will move into the refurbished Argus building - were envisioned in 1965. These are major developments that are changing the University in quite fundamental ways.

Yet, in all this change and development, the original Master Plan has served the University well. It proved flexible enough to cope with most of these developments.

Roy Simpson, who died in 1997, would not be displeased with the way in which his original Master Plan has served the institution.

Dr William Breen, a specialist in US labour history, is an Emeritus Scholar at La Trobe and editor of Building La Trobe University, published in 1989.