About exhibition

Built Legacies: Education, Architecture and the McGlashan Everist Archive

Built Legacies is presented as part of Geelong Design Week (1-11 October 2026) alongside the exhibitions In Place, In Process: Narrating Histories, Futures, Architecture Practices (Deakin A+B Gallery) and Slow Drawing: Djilang/Geelong (Deakin Project Space Gallery).

At the centre of this exhibition is the landmark donation of the McGlashan Everist architectural archive to Deakin University Library. Spanning more than seventy years of practice, the archive documents the work of one of Australia's most influential architectural firms and provides a remarkable record of how architecture has shaped educational, civic and community life in Geelong and beyond.

This exhibition focuses on educational projects – a field in which McGlashan Everist developed expertise from the late 1960s onward. Through drawings, photographs and architectural documentation, visitors are invited to explore how the practice approached the design of schools, universities and educational spaces, and how architecture can influence the experience of learning. From campus planning and adaptive reuse to the careful consideration of landscape, materials and human scale, these projects reveal an architecture shaped as much by people and place as by buildings themselves.

Accompanying the archival material is a selection of Master of Architecture student projects. These works demonstrate the archive's value as an educational resource, revealing how historical drawings, documents and ideas can inform new ways of thinking about architecture, place and design.

The exhibition is organised around a series of themes that emerge consistently across the practice's work: architecture for interaction, place and memory, materiality, and a respectful approach to existing buildings and environments. Together, these themes reveal an architectural philosophy concerned less with monumentality and more with creating places that support everyday life, foster belonging and remain adaptable over time.

Presented within Deakin's Waterfront Campus, itself the result of McGlashan Everist's transformation of the historic Woolstores into an educational precinct, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter the firm's legacy both within the gallery and in the building that surrounds it. In this setting, the archive becomes more than a record of the past. It becomes a resource for understanding how architecture continues to shape the places in which we learn, teach and gather..