Arup Associates has won planning permission for its hexagon-inspired Engineering and Computing Building for Coventry University
The practice landed the £30 million project, which features six-sided desks and a hexagonal patterned façade, following a competition last year in which they beat the likes of Foster & Partners, Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios and Wilkinson Eyre.
The development boasts two separate ‘elements’ – a seven storey block clad in a lightweight timber-framed anodised aluminium façade to the north and a lower l-shaped building to the south which features a level below ground and a planted roof ‘a variety of vegetation known to attract the insect life preferred by Pipistrelle bats’.
‘We have created spaces to facilitate new ways of teaching engineering,’ said Dipesh Patel, director of Arup Associates Patel. ‘Our work supports the faculty’s objective of creating a new pedagogy based upon collaborative learning.
‘Gone are the days of lines of desks, with a lecturer at the front of the class room. Now, students will work around bespoke desks in groups of six, to study and solve problems together.’
Work was originally scheduled to complete in 2011.
The development boasts two separate ‘elements’ – a seven storey block clad in a lightweight timber-framed anodised aluminium façade to the north and a lower l-shaped building to the south which features a level below ground and a planted roof ‘a variety of vegetation known to attract the insect life preferred by Pipistrelle bats’.
‘We have created spaces to facilitate new ways of teaching engineering,’ said Dipesh Patel, director of Arup Associates Patel. ‘Our work supports the faculty’s objective of creating a new pedagogy based upon collaborative learning.
‘Gone are the days of lines of desks, with a lecturer at the front of the class room. Now, students will work around bespoke desks in groups of six, to study and solve problems together.’
Work was originally scheduled to complete in 2011.