Extract

The construction of the new Melbourne School of Design (MSD) Building offered a unique opportunity to capture and document the entire building design and construction process. Documentation was collected from every stage of the project, from the initial design competition held in 2009 to data generated during the current operational phase. This information has been captured in the Melbourne School of Design Building Archive and made available to staff, students, researchers and the broader university community in order to provide a comprehensive resource for future teaching, learning and research. The archive contains tens of thousands of images, documents, drawings and other items of information generated throughout the life of the project. The aim of this paper is to describe what was learnt from the process of creating an archive of a building project in real time. The major challenge as well as greatest opportunity faced in the process of archiving the project was the live nature of the project. The archive represents an important resource that very rarely exists for building projects and its establishment and the processes involved can be seen as a useful model for the production of similar resources for other building projects in the future.

PDF

Download