We’re clear about the kind of university we want to be and are continuing to build world-class facilities to enhance our world-class learning environment: by 2018, we will have invested £200 million in our estates and IT.
We’re making sure that our talented students and staff have the buildings, infrastructure and support they need to deliver innovative solutions that improve the world around us.
To do so, we’re designing our campuses so that they can support the imaginative, collaborative way in which we work. We believe that the creation of knowledge should be an experience with no barriers, so we’re creating learning spaces that make it easier than ever for people to work together. Our architecture will do more than enable staff and students from different disciplines, departments, schools and faculties to work together – it will positively encourage it.
Take a walk around our campuses and you won’t see groups of midwives at one table, engineers at another, journalists in one building and business experts somewhere else. Instead, you’ll see them working together – engineers working with healthcare experts to develop new ways for anaesthetists to practice epidurals, for example, or to advance prosthetic limb technology.
Two shining examples of how we are making sure the bricks and mortar of our buildings reflect our values are our new Student Centre (opened in April 2015) and the new Fusion Building which opened in September 2016.
The Student Centre
This new, six-storey, environmentally friendly building enhances the presence on our Talbot Campus of the Students’ Union at BU. It also provides a stunning space in which students can work together to learn and study, with access to all their support services.
It was designed with energy efficiency in mind, and we’re aiming to achieve an ‘excellent’ rating for the building’s green credentials from BREEAM. Photovoltaic panels and ground source heat pumps reduce our carbon emissions, while a green roof provides insulation and increases the ecological value of the campus as a whole.
The Fusion Building
The new Fusion Building is a physical representation of our vision of Fusion: to create the most stimulating, challenging and rewarding university experience in a world-class learning community. The state-of-the-art facility includes 27 new seminar rooms, three lecture theatres, research space, a 24-station PC laboratory, rooftop terraces and numerous catering facilities all topped with a glass-domed roof. The Fusion Building is BU's most environmentally sustainable building to date, achieving an Energy Performance Certificate rating of A and an 'excellent' rating through BREEAM.