RMIT University has unveiled plans for its innovative Design Hub, set to become a major landmark in the Melbourne CBD.
The $56 million, 11,000 square metre building will occupy the Swanston and Victoria streets corner of the former CUB site.
RMIT Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Margaret Gardner AO, said: “This building symbolises the strengths that RMIT brings to Melbourne. It is a significant part of the University’s $500 million investment into the RMIT Quarter of the CBD.
“The Design Hub has a leading-edge and environmentally responsible design, incorporating a ‘second skin’ of 16,000 glass-capped cylinders that will rotate to help heat and cool the building.
“It will bring together the best people in design in Victoria – industry, practitioners, academics and postgraduate researchers – and will add to design capability in the Victorian economy.
“The Design Hub will be a centre for collaboration – a place to develop world-class concepts and initiatives that will raise this city’s and Victoria’s international profile.
“The plan for the Design Hub caters for and promotes cross-pollinating of ideas via shared research spaces and provides a public interface for displaying the outcomes of that research in a series of exhibition and lecture spaces.
“A Design Archive provides a further means of displaying and preserving significant research outcomes.”
Professor Gardner said researchers would work across academic disciplines on projects in industrial and urban design, fabric and fashion design, architecture and landscape architecture.
The building has been designed by architect and RMIT alumnus, Sean Godsell, who said: “One of Melbourne’s great assets is the RMIT precinct at the northern end of the city. It brings a vitality to that end of the CBD that, along with the State Library and Victoria Market, makes for a rich and diverse urban environment.
“The former brewery site has been a missing piece in this part of town.  Its re-development, starting with the RMIT Design Hub, is fantastic for Melbourne.
“Melbourne is the design capital of Australia and considered one of the world’s pre-eminent design cities. The Design Hub brings together in one building postgraduate design researchers in fields as diverse as aeronautical engineering, industrial design, fashion, furniture, architecture and more.
“The Design Hub is in the vanguard of this shift in emphasis in architecture away from shape-making for its own sake and towards buildings that are high-performance, low-impact, sophisticated pieces of environmental engineering.
“This doesn’t mean that such buildings are without theatre – the Design Hub has a smart skin of more than 16,000 ‘cells’, each capable of shading and assisting in powering the building.
“Over the course of a number of projects now my office has explored the possibility that building envelopes can emulate the performance of human skin, including protection, temperature regulation, sensory perception, filtration and the ability to produce energy. The second skin of the Design Hub incorporates all these functions.
“The Design Hub’s automation system means that the cells track the sun to optimise exposure to PV collectors, to allow the ingress of winter sun and so on. Importantly the cells can be upgraded over time as solar technologies evolve.
“The work environments have access to fresh air filtered through the second skin. The building harvests rain and waste water and uses recycled materials. These and other ESD initiatives will be standard in years to come.
“The apparently simple form of the building is animated by its own environmental performance, via the second skin, which transforms at night into a back-lit screen with the capacity for rear projection.”