Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, UTS Business School

Transcript

[Music] It's such an inspiring space. There are different angles and something different every place you look, so that's really exciting as a student, to work in something that's different. When I walk into the building, I just feel such a strange mix of emotions because it's such an unconventional space. I think we've all been seeing the outside as it's been unfolding and been pretty excited about what it might mean. But when you walk in, the lovely warmth of the use of timber is the first thing that strikes me.

Frank Gehry described this as his dream building. It was a dream for him because it fulfilled an unrealised philosophy of education—the philosophy of a treehouse. A treehouse with a trunk of social spaces, branching into areas of discipline, knowledge and research.

The way that universities operate around the world is fundamentally changing. Students expect different things. They need to be prepared in different manners for their careers for the 21st century. I'd like to think at UTS, we're approaching business as unusual, and for me, that's what this building says. This is the building as unusual—this is the place where you can sort of play with ideas.

The concept of collaboration, of working together, of understanding other people's ideas and issues, has a great capacity to emerge in this type of environment. Collaborative education is incredibly important because we all end up working in teams. The impact of the new building will be a potential for much greater collaboration between students and lecturers. For a start, the physical layout is going to change the way that we teach. This room breaks the way that we traditionally structure a room in terms of the teacher-student dynamic, so it's going to change the method and the technique with which we teach.

You've got collaboration in these new formal teaching spaces, and that's terrific, but I think the really exciting thing from both a teaching and learning perspective is that when class finishes, you see students sitting around putting all those ideas into practice. The informal spaces in the building are essential to a postgraduate student. It's really essential that we have places that we can get together and collaborate, places that we can meet and work on things together.

Education is no longer about something where you're locked away for a few years, you learn things, then you go out and see what the real world is doing. More and more, industry needs to come back in. It's a building that reaches out to the world. It goes beyond the walls. It really means that what we can do here is become much more global.

This new building will really have an impact on postgraduate education. What we do at UTS Business School has always been about collaboration with industry, it's about problem solving and it's about reframing problems so that we can come up with creative solutions. We wanted a building that would differentiate UTS, that would highlight our commitment to creativity, innovation and connection.

It's shaping what the university says about itself, but it's also a marker to that creative, digital hub in which the whole university is now sitting. This building really symbolises for me the innovation of UTS, the commitment of UTS to my education and to making sure that what I learn is world class.