New building shows scientists at work
The final touches of Victoria University’s $100 million purpose-built School of Biological Sciences will be made before students enter the four-storey Wellington building in the new year.
It’s been five years since the Kelburn campus project began, but researchers have moved into the open-plan construction, which houses two research and four teaching laboratories and sits a third underground on what was once a carpark.
A shield of glass faces residents on Kelburn Parade, which the architects Warren and Mahoney said was designed to allow the public to watch the campus’ scientists in action.
Lead architect Rodney Sampson said the building had environmentally sustainable features: capturing natural light, with installed solar panels and water tanks, and surrounded by native landscaping.
Materials like concrete, wood, steel and rubber finish the modern layout that’s linked with the campus’s other science faculties to create a ‘‘science precinct’’.
There are also 800 ‘‘shock absorbers’’ within the buildings design which Sampson said ‘‘performed well’’ following the Kaiko¯ura earthquake last year, when the building was still under construction.
A year later, the university’s resident tuatara family were the first to move inside Te Toki a Rata with the completion of their purpose-built enclosure inside the campus building’s foyer.
But, the best view has been reserved for the plants on the top floor overlooking the city and Wellington Harbour.
Four separate green-houses mimic the temperatures of climates around the world for research such as the effects of climate change on plants.
School of Biological Sciences professor Simon Davy said the facility brought the campus up to speed with others around the world. It allowed room to grow and had attracted students and scientists with the building’s ability to adapt to new research.
There are 230 seats in the double-tier lecture theatre and two flat-floor ‘‘flexible teaching spaces’’ that seat 65 and 80 students.
He said the university’s academics were still getting used to the idea of shared office spaces but were excited to leave the ‘‘tired’’ science building behind.
‘‘Everyone is blown away. The people in the school are very excited. It’s like a massive sea change.’’
The teaching rooms and lecture halls were designed as ‘‘collaborative learning spaces’’ for a digital age which Davy said was the ‘‘vogue style of teaching’’ in the science realm.
Student work areas are dotted throughout the building in an open plan style with options to retreat to quite rooms, pods and seating areas overlooking the campus.
The labs will be the engine rooms of the building however, with scientists working on DNA fingerprinting for conservation work for coral reefs and fish stock and studying samples from Antarctica.
‘‘We’ve gone to a state of the art facility from a tired, sick building.’’
Victoria University campus development associate director Satish Dahya said there were still no plans for the School of Biological Sciences old building.