Steele Building (University of Queensland)

FDC (QLD) have recently completed a fitout for the University of Queensland’s ‘Steele Building’ located on their St Lucia Campus.

The University of Queensland (QQ) engaged FDC to completed works within the Steele Building, as part of its continuation to improving its award-winning Geosciences education program. The School of Earth Sciences proposed to merge and refurbish 3 of the rooms, located within Level 2 of the Steele Building, into a single multi-functional, multi-media / microscopy / computational teaching laboratory. The newly designed and equipped facility provides a fundamental change in the modes of delivery of the Geosciences program

The 1,000sqm fitout involved merging three separate rooms within the Steele Building into a single, fully equipped and integrated multidisciplinary practical laboratory; capable of supporting mapping, visualisation, microscopy, computational, and online learning activities. However the newly created space, can still be split into separate rooms to increase the whole areas useability.

A single room was created to provide an annex teaching space to make the best use of the very high specification geochemical and microscopy equipment such as a desktop Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and a portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer.

The main feature of the room/s is the central mechanical duct, in which runs the length of the building and has been wrapped in coloured acoustic colour fabric, (Autex). Glass stacking doors, split the room into two functional individual labs and many of the heritage elements within the building have been retained and show the delineation of Old and New.

External to the building, new and refurbished benches provide breakout spaces as informal learning spaces.

Project Features

Merging three separate rooms into a single, fully equipped and integrated multidisciplinary practical laboratory
A single room was created to provide an annex teaching space to make the best use of the very high specification geochemical and microscopy equipment
Glass stacking doors, split the room into two functional individual labs
Heritage elements within the building have been retained and show the delineation of Old and New
New and refurbished benches provide breakout spaces as informal learning spaces