The Nuanced Nature in the Interior Design of Hassell

Hassell is awarded the Enrico Taglietti Award for Educational Architecture for the refurbishment of the Birch Building at ANU. The work by Hassell on this significant and very large ANU building has restored and celebrated its significant heritage and transformed its amenity, comfort and energy use. Most importantly for this category however, Hassell has radically changed the ability of the building to support best-practice education and research in a highly effective and thoroughly contemporary setting.

Hassell has demonstrated a detailed understanding of the client’s requirements for this building, evident in the variety and specificity of the program which includes highly serviced laboratories with demanding technical requirements.

Most impressively, the program was developed without the benefit of briefing from established user groups as the Research School of Aeronautical, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and the School of Cybernetics established curriculum and academic staff parallel to the design process. In response, the resulting spaces are observably diverse, flexible, and adaptable while maintaining rigour and visual cohesion.

The nuanced nature of best-practice pedagogical architecture is strongly evident. Spaces are useful, technical and practical but they are designed with people in mind. All tasks are provided for, all personality types accommodated. There is intensity and respite and consideration of culture and collegiality. This is exemplary educational architecture.

Hassell is awarded the W. Hayward Morris Award for Interior Architecture for the refurbishment of the Birch Building at ANU. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the work undertaken by Hassell in in the Birch Building is there is the sense that you are experiencing the original building. More detailed investigation reveals that a thorough and extensive re-working has taken place. 

Underpinning all the work is a respectful and knowledgeable understanding of the building’s original fabric. This has ensured that the new interiors are intrinsically connected to the building’s original expression texturally, materially and tonally. Impressively, this nuanced understanding of the building’s personality is not simply reproduction nor restoration but rather an amplification of the original intention, achieved with careful attention to detailing, colour and comprehensive integration with technical and programmatic imperatives.

Excellence is evident in the focused approach to each element and through thorough co-ordination with the many allied disciplines. Reticulation of services is flawless. Furniture, fittings and fixtures are co-ordinated in form, colour and arrangement. While the interior shows an overarching design sensibility and rigorous consistency, Hassell also demonstrate an appreciation that this building is for humans. Ingeniously, they accommodate intimacy, introspection, collegiality and conviviality through subtle but remarkably effective shifts of colour, intensity and texture.