Sydney Law School

Sydney Law School

We interpreted this project as an opportunity to redefine and reinterpret the architectural dialectic between city and campus: to extend the public domain and create a new opening of the university to the community, parkland and city beyond, with the study of law balanced carefully at this new threshold.
We began by dividing the project's complex and extensive programme into podium and superstructures. This allowed the creation a new, open-space sequence of lawns, terraces and plazas adjoining Eastern Avenue, the primary public artery of the campus.

Below these open spaces and within the solid podium, is positioned the library and teaching spaces accessed from stepped terraces and naturally lit from above through skylights and clerestories. Suspended above this public platform are a series of slender superstructures that split and splinter the remaining programme fragments. These fragments then coalesce at specific moments to define and frame new open spaces.

The materials of the splintered forms that define this edge and opening are layers of glass and timber louvres, suspended on fine stainless steel rods. These splinters possess a kinetic grain that changes with the position of the sun and preferences of those behind the timber screens. The ventilated double-skin system of enclosure draws in and controls natural air circulating through and around the interior, tempering the environment to cool and heat as necessary. The varying grain of the timber screens are overlaid with reflections of the park landscape and neo-gothic sandstone façades: a distilled reflection of the form, its means and its intent.

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fjcstudio acknowledges all Aboriginal and Torres  Strait Islander peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work.

We recognise their continuing connection to Country and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

We extend this acknowledgement to Indigenous People globally, recognising their human rights and freedoms as articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.