The new School of Design and the Built Environment (DBE) at Curtin University is the third architecture school that John Wardle Architects (JWA) has designed over the past two decades. The University of South Australia’s Kaurna Building was the first, in 2006, followed by the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, in 2015. Together, these three projects describe both the incremental changes occurring in the way architectural education is delivered, and the impacts of different procurement models on built outcomes.
Curtin’s old architecture building – or Building 201, as it was affectionately called – was designed by Vin Davies of the Public Works Department in 1969. A monument to brutalism, it sits at the centre of
