Western Sydney University Liverpool Campus
Woods Bagot
Australia
Exemplifying a blended learning approach through a highly connected and collaborative environment, Woods Bagot’s design delivers a dynamic and brand-aligned vertical city campus for 2,500 students. Western Sydney University (WSU) established a new ten-storey vertical campus within Liverpool delivering the highest-quality educational opportunities to one of Sydney’s emerging CBDs.
The campus provides accessible shared services such as a library, student hub and student services catering to over 2,000 students. This new city campus typology supports a centralised education offering that will make tertiary education more easily available to the western Sydney population catchment.
Woods Bagot’s value proposition was to create a vibrant and brand-defining city campus – a building that exemplifies collaborative and blended learning through a highly connected learning environment. Centred around the idea of ‘connectography’, the building combines globally minded, technology-driven ‘connectivity’ with ‘geography’, which in this case references the location of Liverpool and its relationship back to the city and eastern seaboard.
‘Connectography’ permeates the design through the introduction of organic forms and meandering circulation pathways. Flexible learning studios function as anchors on each floor of the building, while a series of stairs and voids in a continuous meandering route creates a vertical link that encourages informal meetings between students, academics and industry professionals. Public interaction is encouraged on the ground plane. Here, the community can visually connect with the building’s internal activities.
Students are offered an unparalleled twenty-first-century learning experience with technology that enables new learning pedagogies. The design delivers a vertical campus that enables and exemplifies creativity, choice and critical thinking for the next generation of social science and nursing and midwifery graduates.
Photography: Trevor Mein.