ABSTRACT
Established in 1971, Griffith University was part of the coordinated expansion of tertiary education in Australia in the post-WWII decades and was unique in coalescing an innovative pedagogical agenda with a distinctive campus design. Whereas most of the new campuses built in Australia after WWII were in peri-urban locations on greenfield sites, Griffith’s bush campus was established in a remnant eucalypt forest, which became an important setting for the pioneering School of Australian Environment Studies. This chapter explores the development of Griffith’s bush campus as both a design and pedagogical concept. It explores how the pursuit of a problem-oriented pedagogy was the engine for interdisciplinary teaching and research and reflects on the different roles the campus played in supporting this agenda: as a material setting for learning and as an object through which environmental subjectivity was negotiated. This history is contextualised in relation to the development of environmentalism and environmental education in Australia and alongside the evolution of the concept of environmental design in architecture. These are presented as parallel narratives of disciplinary disruption, one in which interdisciplinary teaching and research yielded new knowledge and practices in the area of environmental studies, and another in which concepts of environmental design tested the limits of architecture’s professional identity.
