Keeping What Matters: Custodianship in the Retrofit of Mid-Century Campus Buildings

This article is based on a presentation by senior associate Hannah Kuek and director Jesse Judd to University of Melbourne’s Retrofit Forum in June 2026. The theme was Mid-Century Concrete Buildings, and the presentation “Refurbishing a Mid-Century Icon: The Role of Building Custodianship” focused on ARM’s Baillieu Library Special Collections project. 

The easy position on retrofit is to say that retention is always good and demolition is always bad. Harder but more useful, more forensic and more architectural, is to understand the building’s value and its limits, and then decide what kind of future it deserves.  

This was the central proposition in ARM Architecture’s contribution to the University of Melbourne’s Retrofit Forum, presented through the live case study of the Baillieu Library Special Collections project. 

The question: can this building be saved? isn’t enough. The question needs to be: can this building be given a better next life and meet the demands of contemporary teaching and learning environments? 

Reframing the question moves the debate beyond sentiment or crude cost comparison. It demands a broader form of judgement: cultural, technical, environmental, operational and architectural. It recognises that buildings are not just carbon stores or heritage objects, they’re social infrastructure, holding memory and shaping behaviour. They can also be compromised, dysfunctional, under-serviced, badly altered and incapable of doing the work now required of them. 

A good retrofit or refurbishment begins with that tension. 

University campuses are full of mid-century buildings that sit in an awkward cultural position. They are often too recent to be comfortably historic, too familiar to be romantic, and too useful to be left alone. Some were built quickly, on tight budgets, with modest finishes and unforgiving technical limitations. Low floor-to-floor heights, ageing services, non-compliant fire strategies, poor thermal performance and incomplete documentation are often not incidental problems. They are the project. 

Yet these buildings are also part of the emotional and intellectual life of the campus. The Baillieu Library is a perfect example. We didn’t pretend it was a flawless building. In many ways, it’s difficult, constrained and technically imperfect. But is it culturally important? Absolutely. 

The Baillieu is complained about as much as it is complimented. It’s polarising – criticised, remembered and used. The university’s own campus feedback identified it as both a deeply popular study destination and a building with real issues.  

ARM’s most important move was the decision to step back. The original commission could have been approached as a contained refurbishment: repair this area, relocate that function, make the new spaces work. Instead, we proposed a building masterplan. Not because the brief required it, but because staged retrofit without a long-term strategy is how good buildings become incoherent. 

This is the central discipline of custodianship. You don’t just solve the funded stage, you solve the funded stage in a way that makes the next stage easier, clearer and better. You resist the temptation to add another layer of ad hoc improvement to a building already carrying decades of partial interventions. 

“A partial refurbishment in that context can quickly become another patch but a masterplan turns it into a sequence.”
—Senior associate and project leader, Hannah Kuek

The Baillieu is not one simple building. It’s four connected buildings constructed over a twenty-year period, each with its own construction logic, services systems and later accretions. A partial refurbishment in that context can quickly become another patch but a masterplan turns it into a sequence. 

ARM’s strategy reframed the project as a 20-plus year proposition. The building stack became legible: lower ground for protection, preservation, processing and transfer; ground for talking, listening and collaboration; level one for inspiration, exhibition and access to collections; upper levels for collaboration, focus, work and sanctuary. In a complex existing building, clarity is not a graphic exercise. It is an operational achievement. 

Good retrofit doesn’t freeze a building at the moment of opening, nor does it apply a nostalgic mid-century filter over contemporary requirements. Done properly the task is to understand what the original building was trying to do, then pursue that ambition with today’s tools. 

One of the strongest examples in the Baillieu strategy is the reinterpretation of compression and release. The original library used voids and spatial openings to create moments of generosity, light and orientation. Over time, many of those voids were enclosed or compromised by fire requirements and piecemeal interventions and the effect was lost. 

ARM’s response was not simply to reinstate the past. Instead, the design translated the idea into a ceiling and floorplate strategy. Where the building offers light, outlook and student amenity, ceilings are opened up to maximise height and generosity. Where the plan does harder work – stacks, amenities, storage, circulation, services – the lower ceiling zones become the compression. Not copied, the original spatial idea is made useful again. 

The same logic applies to materials, furniture and colour. The project audits and reuses existing furniture rather than treating the interior as disposable. It draws on existing fabric: mosaic, stone, timber, original fittings, the Norma Redpath sculpture, Featherston chairs, modernist precedents and Le Corbusier’s colour keyboards. But these references are disciplined, a design grammar. 

The proposed balance between baseline spaces and destination spaces is particularly intelligent. Not every corner of a large university building can be a “wow” moment, and nor should it be. The baseline gives the building coherence, durability and maintainability. The destination spaces provide intensity, identity and delight. That balance prevents refurbishment from becoming either bland standardisation or theatrical over-design. 

The public face of refurbishment is usually the room: the reading space, the lounge, the gallery, the study setting. But the success of a project like Baillieu depends on the invisible architecture of services, fire, humidity, security, access and staging. 

The Special Collections project isn’t simply a library interior. It must house, protect, process and make accessible valuable collections. That means stable temperature, humidity control, pest deterrence, water ingress protection, fire protection, secure handling, quarantine, conservation and reading protocols. The project has to make knowledge more accessible while making fragile objects safer. 

That is what custodianship looks like in technical form. It is not glamorous, but it is decisive. 

The Baillieu Library project shows that the future of a mid-century building does not depend on pretending it is perfect. Serious retrofit or refurbishment begins with an honest account of imperfection: awkward structure, ageing systems, difficult compliance, compromised fabric, changing use and partial knowledge. 

And it also begins with respect: for memory, for use, for the accumulated life of a place, and for the possibility that an ordinary building may matter deeply. 

The best retrofit work doesn’t merely conserve; it edits, repairs, translates and extends. It gives the building back to its users with more dignity, more clarity and more life. 

Custodianship is not nostalgia. It’s the discipline of making a building useful enough to be loved again generations into the future.