Purpose-Built Indigenous Learning Space: Jim Baa Yer Resource Centre | ACU Melbourne
As a specialist tertiary education architect, HATZ delivered a purpose-built Indigenous learning space for the Australian Catholic University: shaped by deep community consultation, resolved as a genuine architectural commitment. Not a gesture toward cultural identity. A decision to place it at the centre of the design.
The challenge
A purpose-built Indigenous space is not a fit-out category. It is a responsibility. ACU understood this. So did we.
The challenge was simple in principle: to create a space the ACU Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student community could recognise as genuinely theirs. Cultural identity would not be applied after the fact but would shape the design from the beginning. Every functional and spatial decision needed to respond to what the community actually required, not to institutional assumptions.
JIM BAA YER RESOURCE CENTRE, AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
Tucked within the Mary Glowrey Building at 115 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy, the original Jim Baa Yer Resource Centre served the ACU Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student community without truly belonging to them. The entry carried no cultural weight. The interior offered no clear invitation.
We did not arrive with a concept. We arrived with questions. In deep conversation with the JBY user group, one symbol emerged: the river. The Wurundjeri river-waterflow motif, a symbol of connection, continuity and movement through Country, became the organising idea that unified every design decision. We listened until the right one emerged. Then we designed it.
That symbol is expressed in the timber and finds its fullest expression in a sculptural slump-glass artwork at the entry, manufactured by Wathaurong Glass and Arts, featuring a translation of ACU's First People Logo. Not art placed in a building. An architectural statement: culturally grounded, expertly resolved, unmistakably theirs.
Why this matters
When a student walks into a space and recognises it as theirs, that is not a design outcome. It is a human one. At ACU, HATZ approached the Jim Baa Yer brief with one starting point: genuine listening. The architecture follows from that. It always does.
This is architecture that shapes how we learn. And how we belong.
Designing a Future Worth Learning In™
Overview
Client: Australian Catholic University
Location: Level 1, Mary Glowrey Building, 115 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy VIC
Type: Institutional Fit-Out
Role: Principal Consultant
Scope of work: Full Services
Budget & size: 150m2
Completed: Feb 2020
Credits
Design: HATZ
Project Team: Steve Hatzellis, Shenia Lay, Kyle Liu and Belinda Smole
Project Manager: ACU Development & Capital Projects
Services: BRT Consulting
BCA: PLP Building Surveyors & Consultants
Builder: SHAPE
Specialist Trade: Wathaurong Glass
Photography: HATZ