Birmingham City University’s new £31m building has officially opened, offering additional teaching and learning space for 3,000 students and staff within more than 650 rooms.
Facing Gopsal Street, the new building — Curzon B — comprises 100,000 sq ft of additional facilities for the institution’s existing City Centre Campus courses. Designed by Birmingham-based Associated Architects and constructed by Willmott Dixon, the building will assist in catering for the needs of the institution’s growing student numbers.
The structure extends the University’s £63m Curzon building, which has been housed on Cardigan Street in Birmingham’s Eastside since 2015 and continues the University’s transformation of this part of the city.
Professor Philip Plowden, Vice-Chancellor, Birmingham City University, said: “From individual study pods to meeting rooms, we hope that students will really benefit from these facilities that will help them achieve success in their studies. We are committed to providing the best possible learning experience for all our students and this extension will play a key part for that aim.”
As part of the project, 3,000 students from the University’s Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment gained real-life experience of working across the construction industry by putting the theory learned in the classroom into practice. Furthermore, the developers offered 10 paid placements throughout the build, while three graduates are now employed full time by Willmott Dixon in the Birmingham region.
The building forms part of the University’s £260m investment into new and advanced facilities which was also strengthened with the opening of the new £57m Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in September last year. Later this year, Birmingham City University will open its new £41m Health Sciences and Education building on its City South Campus on Westbourne Road in Edgbaston. The space will offer teacher training and specialist facilities for health sciences including provision for research, a new lecture theatre, a multi-purpose hall, speech therapy, physiotherapy and ultrasound suites, art and technology classrooms and IT hubs.
