Australian university campuses are being asked to adjust quickly once again. Those campuses are made up of buildings the universities already own. Whether an existing building is upgraded, converted or pulled down has become part of the calculation.

The picture looked very different five years ago. Australian universities were pushed into a worldwide trial of studying and working online, and campuses made of real buildings briefly appeared to be no longer needed. Artificial intelligence has since disrupted the assessment of learning, and teaching is moving back towards in-person formats. Making physical campuses welcoming and attractive has therefore regained attention.

Each era of construction and campus planning has mirrored the shifting needs and ambitions of Australia's universities. Campuses show quite openly the successive architectural and landscape fashions that also formed Australian cities and suburbs. Some of those who lead universities, along with planning consultants and architects, nevertheless seem unhappy with certain features of the campuses they inherited.

The oldest of those layers belongs to the "sandstone" universities, 19th-century foundations such as Melbourne and Sydney. Their early campuses followed a cloistered arrangement taken from the United Kingdom — enclosed and sheltered, turned away from the city outside. They were deliberately refined, and keen to display their ties to British traditions of learning.

In the decades after the war, those earlier British influences were displaced by planned modernist settings carrying new civic ambitions. The campuses of Macquarie, Murdoch, La Trobe, Newcastle and Flinders were built from raw concrete and brickwork left unpainted, and characteristically Australian landscapes grew up around them, signalling a more democratic entry to higher education. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, additions to the older campuses reproduced that rough appearance and feel. The University of Sydney gained a new engineering precinct, and the University of Melbourne a new medical one, both built much like the recent universities.