Melbourne campus Master Plan
Tony Inglis takes you on a tour of the Melbourne campus to explain the new buildings and proposed architectural changes to the Melbourne campus.
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Hi, I'm Tony Inglis, Executive Director Infrastructure and Operations at La Trobe University. One of the things we have been doing a lot of work on is a new master plan for the Melbourne campus. So what I am going to do today is to take you for a walk through parts of the Melbourne campus, show you some of the things we want to do some work on and some of the changes we want to make, we'll also show some of the features of the campus that we think are great and we want to make sure we keep.
We're in the Agora of the campus at the moment and in many ways the heart of our campus at Bundoora. One of the things we want to do with the master plan is to extend that heart to another courtyard to the west as our population on campus grows, it will become more and more crowded here so we want to spread the services we provide here to other areas. So you can see behind me some of the food and beverage outlets and we will be moving those to the west into the courtyard to the west. The Agora has in it a number of functions both food and beverage, services such as banks and we've also got the more scholarly outlets like our bookshop and also behind me as you can see our library where we're spending $10 million as part of a Federal Government funded initiative to deliver more learning space for our campus. Another initiative we've been wanting to take on as part of the master plan is to extend our food and beverage outlets, so you can see behind me here the Agora West building, we're looking to extend that and open that out so you can see from this courtyard through to the Agora West and have more food and beverage outlets around the other side.
So we're at the northern end of the campus here and you can see the roundabout at the top of Science Drive behind me. One of the things the Master Plan suggests is to actually give La Trobe a front door, give it an arrival up on Plenty Rd where most of our traffic passes by. So the image you can see shows how we treat the pathway between Plenty Rd and the top of the campus. So you come to La Trobe with a sense of arrival, a sense of grandeur rather than dodging cars and buses and walking on muddy paths.
So now we're at the top of Science Drive and I have got the Health Sciences Faculty to my left and the George Singer Building to my right. The original Master Plan said the La Trobe Melbourne campus would be a campus for pedestrians, but since that time we've put a road network through parts of our campus. So what is suggested in this new Master Plan is that we return the campus to pedestrians, so we'd shut down this as a roadway, we'd pave it over as you can see in the image and have it used as a major north/south pedestrian way. So you can see this as a paved path, you can still see the pedestrian overpass and what you can also see off to the right is a bus interchange, so we'd be moving the bus interchange into what is now currently the visitor car park. So we're bringing public transport as close to the heart of campus as we can.
So I'm now in front of the Thomas Cherry Building and over the road from what would be the new bus interchange what is currently the visitor car park. You can see at the bottom of the Thomas Cherry Building we're already doing some construction work on the new student hub, so this is an over the counter, a centralisation over the counter service provision to students. Just as the Master Plan saw Science Drive becoming a major north/south pedestrian way through the campus, it's proposing this part through here become the major east/west pedestrian way through the campus, through the Agora and terminating at Simpson Lawn.
You also see in the image some food and beverage outlets at the bottom of the Physical Sciences Building and that's starting to energise that Agora West courtyard as we spoke about before of extending that Agora West into another courtyard.
We spoke before about that heart enlargement operation and extending the Agora to the west as our student and staff population grows and this is the area we'd be moving into over time, and we'd be tending to populate this courtyard with more of the active operations like food and beverage. So the image you can see, the ground floor of the Agora West building, the building behind us being opened out all the way through and having food and beverage outlets spilling out into this courtyard with some shading so we've got some in the open and under cover seating. You'll also see this courtyard under construction over the next few months between now and the end of the year as the landscaping work that is associated with the student hub project is done.
So we're here on Trendall Walk, which is a short gravel path next to our moat system here at our Melbourne campus. One of the things the current draft Master Plan recognises is that as a campus we're a bit isolated from the local community so a number of the projects involve better engaging with the local community and finding ways of draw them into our campus. So one of the things we'd like to do is to build on this fantastic setting of moats that we have here and develop a path right from Darebin Creek, south of our campus through and along the moat system, through our campus up to the Wildlife Sanctuary where we'd have some sort of a destination building, an interpretive centre or something that invites the community to come in and enjoy the benefits of the work that La Trobe has put into that land rehabilitation project over many, many years. So the image you see shows the path developed by the side of the ponds, this also allows, having an elevated walkway allows us to treat the edges of the pond and improve the water quality within them.
It's a great site isn't it. That's progress on our campus, two cranes on campus. This is the construction of the AgriBio, the Biosciences Research Centre project, a $288 million investment from La Trobe University and the State Government's Department of Primary Industries will be delivering state of the art agricultural biosciences research facilities for 400 staff of La Trobe University and the Department of Primary Industries.
So I hope that's given you a bit of an idea of some of the things we'd like to do in this proposed Master Plan, and some of the projects that we think it will take this campus forward into the future. If you'd like any more information you can visit our website.
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