John Wardle Architects - Learning & Teaching Building

The Learning and Teaching Building (LTB) for Monash University is the new gateway to the Clayton campus from Wellington Road. LTB is a multi-faculty learning facility that serves a significant proportion of the student teaching load. Innovative formal learning and teaching spaces are complemented by informal learning hubs that deliver a variety of study settings. Learning spaces are grouped in clusters and supported by informal learning spaces throughout the building like neighbourhoods.

Landscape, and its change over time, has been a strong theme for the site of the Clayton campus - starting with indigenous bushland, then colonial farmland, suburban subdivision and finally a university campus.Streets, courtyards, bridges, balconies and stairs are transformed into ravines, clearings, strands, perches, escarpments and amphitheatres that are choreographed to invent a new landscape of the interior.

The learning activities of the interior are, in this way, made visible and accessible to the wider campus and community, rather than removed from the ground in a vertical structure.The LTB demonstrates a shift away from the modernist stand-alone tower instead incorporating a horizontal field of spaces set within a broad, low rise building.