“Please do not study” is scrawled in chalk on one of the columns inside the library at the new Student Pavilion at the University of Melbourne. The request is a clue, a tip-off that the main priority in this particular corner of one of the world’s top public research institutions, is not academics. Instead, the idea is to provide an environment where students, most of whom live off campus, can meet for a coffee, chat on a sunny terrace, unwind alone with a good book—and if they must, do some studying. Such campus spaces for socializing and decompressing, until now, had been lacking, says Julie Eizenberg, founding principal of Santa Monica, California–based Koning Eizenberg Architecture (KEA), the design architect for the four-story, 27,000-square-foot building. The school “wanted to amp up its student experience game,” adds Eizenberg, who is an alumna of the School of Design at the university, which ranks as Australia’s second-oldest.
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