MONASH UNIVERSITY, SCENIC BOULEVARD ARRIVAL LANDSCAPE AND CARPARK
Traditional Custodians - Bunurong
Location – Monash University Clayton Campus, Victoria
Client – Monash University
Layered, biodiverse planting evoking a grassy woodlands ecological community forms an engaging public interface that integrates porosity for fluid connections, offering an immersive encounter with the campus’s bushland setting.
A welcome landscape evoking the grassy woodlands of South Eastern Australia, the design frames a key arrival point to Monash University's Clayton Campus from Scenic Boulevard. Diverse and layered planting animates this transitory space, featuring local flowering species and grasses beneath a dense matrix of open-formed Eucalyptus, punctuated by basalt stone and timber in provision of habitat value.
The porous design of the arrival landscape allows for high-volume foot traffic and multi-directional pedestrian flows as a high traffic key entry point, while integrating detailed and extensive planting. The design has effectively recalibrated the space, reprogramming pedestrian circulation, integrating Universal Access and improved visual orientation as a core priority, consolidating car parking, improving the safety and efficiency of access for emergency vehicles, incorporating refurbished elements and maximising environmental performance and amenity through the introduction of shade canopy, increased local bio-diversity.
Bush Project operated as the Lead Landscape Architect for the project. The project brief required the update of an existing on-grade car park, servicing security and emergency vehicles, incorporating loading access and services and to improve connectivity and access within the pedestrian entry point to the Monash University Clayton Campus.
The design features islands of soft landscape hosting a dense mosaic of diverse species within a contained site area (over fifty species), selected for provision of value to local species, and to establish an ongoing seasonal presence of flowering species that sustains a presence of flowering colour throughout the year, services pollinators and animates local seasons.
Concentrated clusters of layered vegetation establish a distinctive landscape presence on the Boulevard that extends the bushland setting as a public interface, while maintaining visual and physical connections to the broader campus context.
The carpark is situated within a sacrificial landscape zone, outlined within the long-term campus masterplan, in response the planting features succession planting, including the fast-growing, shorter-lived local species Acacia mearnsii - a keystone species in biodiversity for its high value to fauna and invertebrates that provides a rapid shade canopy and more immediate environmental value. The taxi cab rank adjacent narrow lawn was replaced with diverse, low maintenance vegetation. The approach demonstrates how vegetation can be selected and applied in response to a broader context of planning and future management of the built environment while optimising immediate environmental amenity.
