TAFE Queensland Robina

TAFE Queensland’s Robina campus was already a good-looking building before we arrived, and the brief was to let the planting work with it rather than against it. Two hundred and seventeen plants now run through the foyer, the upper levels and the balcony.

The brief

The campus interior was already well resolved, with a warm material palette and a lot of timber, so the planting was never going to be the loudest thing in the room. It was there to soften the hard edges, add depth where a corridor or a foyer could otherwise feel flat, and carry some life up through five levels of a building that students move through all day.

The client had already chosen and placed their own decorative pots, which we were happy to work with. Plenty of our projects start with a pot we have specified ourselves; this one started with forty-four the client had already chosen, and part of the job was making them hold a plant properly.

Working with what was already there

Pots chosen for how they look are not always built to hold a living plant. Each one was sealed inside with two coats, its drainage holes closed, and the void beneath filled so the plant would sit at the right height rather than the pot needing to be packed to the brim.

That came with its own rhythm. Sealing takes two days of drying between coats, and where a bitumen sealant is used nothing can be planted into it for five days afterwards, so the pot preparation set the installation schedule rather than the other way around.

The planting

The planting runs from the foyer up through levels one to four, out onto the balcony and back through ground floor admin. The client’s decorative pots carry the most visible work, holding forty-eight plants across the foyer and the upper levels, where a large specimen has room to be looked at properly. The tambour units take another one hundred and thirty-four, softening joinery that would otherwise read as a long flat run, and the pillar planter and the level four bar gantry troughs pick up the same idea at a smaller scale. Six mobile planters move around the campus as it needs them.

The finishes were chosen against the interior rather than by default. Pine bark mulch tops the pots and the pillar planter, warm against the timber it sits beside. The tambour units are finished with charcoal lava pebble instead, which picks up the darker joinery and stays where it is put in a planter that gets moved. The effect across the five levels is less a set of plant displays than a softening of what the architect had already done, which is what the client wanted.

Maintenance

The campus is on a regular service, which is what keeps the planting reading as part of the building rather than as something added to it. Each visit covers watering, cleaning and polishing foliage, wiping down the pots, monitoring moisture, pruning and turning plants to hold their shape and the original design intent, checking for signs of disease, fertilising, topping up the dressing, and changing any plant that has started to go backwards.

A supervisor inspects the site periodically, separately from the technician servicing it.