UniMelb adds Swanston Street to their student accommodation portfolio

The University of Melbourne is once more chasing the right to create another significant student housing complex.

Located at 625-631 Swanston Street, the project has been dubbed Lincoln Square South and finds itself in the middle of Melbourne's evolving student precinct centred around Carlton's Swanston Street stretch. Lincoln Square South is the latest development that will help support the 50,000 students that visit the institution's Parkville campus.

Submitted last month, the Hayball-designed 14 level building includes capacity for 656 students.

Carrying a cost of development just shy of $70 million, the project requires demolition of three conjoined sites that house buildings dated from 1922 to 1955. An adjoining historic former warehouse building at 11-13 Lincoln Square will be reworked to become a learning hub.

625-631 Swanston Street application summary

• Site area: 2,568sqm
• Proposed: 14 level tower 
• 656 beds: 161 x studio, 154 x twin studio, 341 x cluster
• 2,098sqm of communal area
• 430sqm learning hub
• Ground floor retail space: 250sqm
• Provision for 20 vehicles and 172 bicycles
• GFA: 20,756sqm
• Estimated cost of development: $68,262,000

In Hayball's words

The vision for the Lincoln Square South project is to establish an new exemplar for managed student accommodation within the City that brings together academic support with residential life. The facility will seek to set a new benchmark for quality accommodation operation, and to provide a unique addition to student accommodation offerings in Melbourne.

The residence will support a contemporary scholarly community, with academic leadership and quality professional support, delivering a new Hall of Residence on the South side of the Parkville campus. Central to the project is the alignment of a new and unique scholarship program with a quality residential experience. The new accommodation will support up to 60 scholarship students.

The architectural form provides a contemporary response to the University tradition of courtyard and cloister with student common spaces and upper level rooms arranged around a landscaped inner court.

The facade composition and materials incorporates a high quality of finishes and detail, reinforcing the emerging street wall civic scale of Swanston Street and which is complementary to the industrial heritage streetscape on Lincoln Square south.

Swanston Street's appeal - or lack of

625-631 Swanston Street's arrival continues to boost the design merits of Swanston Street.

The early 2000s saw a raft of poorly executed student housing projects line the thoroughfare, turning vast stretches of Carlton's Swanston Street into somewhat of a merit free design wasteland, with the Ian Potter Museum of Art being the exception. In recent times though the general quality of projects proposed or delivered in the area has risen markedly.

Piccolo's award-winning Upper House and the RMIT Design Hub began to turn the design tide, with a number of other projects also waiting in the wings.

Should 625-631 Swanston Street gain approval, it would join the Jackson Clements Burrows-designed 558-566 Swanston Street and the at construction 599-605 Swanston Street in lifting the overall design qualities of the area.

625-631 Swanston Street development team

• Developer: University of Melbourne
• Architect: Hayball
• Town planning & landscape design: Tract Consultants
• Structural: Webber Design
• Geotechnical: GeoAust
• Services: Lucid Consulting
• Building Surveyor: Mckenzie Group
• Fire Safety: Omnii
• Traffic: Impact
• Facade Engineer: BG&E
• Accessibility: MGAC
• ESD: Wood & Grieve Engineers
• Heritage Consultant: David Bick
• Waste Consultant: Leigh Consulting
• Acoustic: Octave