And now let's go to London to the amazing Kingston University Town House, please the floor is yours
Thank you. I'm going to start with the programme. We had a very complicated ambition
a kind of crazy ambition for this building. So we wanted, we needed a new library
and so there's the question of what is a library in a digital age
we wanted a place to put our dance students so we needed dance studios, we wanted to soften that
threshold between the University and the city that can be a quite scary line for the public to cross
and we wanted to create a presence, the front of the University you were greeted by 150 car
parking spots and a few portacabins which I think if they'd remained much longer they
would have been listed because there were temporary buildings there for about 40 years
so the building was supposed to do a lot for us it was also supposed to create
a campus because we didn't really have a campus, we had a collection of buildings
so we decided that this was such a crazy collection of things we needed that the
building had to work so hard, that we should have a design competition, and we chose Grafton because
they understood the ambition behind the programme better than we did, and I'm going to come back
to that in a second because they were very excited about how radical this really was
and the questions that we were asking and in the competition design there was
clearly a building which would be able, a design which would
be able to evolve as our thinking evolved because the other thing that was going on
was that we were becoming much more ambitious as a university. We're not a famous university, we're
professional, technical, education, half our students are the first in their family to go to university
but we were starting to become much more ambitious and wanted to be prouder about who we are we
wanted the architecture to help us do that as well, to raise our sights and to raise the prominence of
the University at the same time. So that's a lot to ask of of a single building I must say
and we got more than we could have hoped for because we got all of those things
but during the process of the further design of the building, the construction of
the building we kept talking to Grafton, we did something really which I've never heard anyone
do before but I would recommend it highly, is that we kept the design jury intact so every few months
we would meet, the design jury would meet with the architects again
to talk about design, not about the budget, not about whether things were on schedule or not, not
to any of that stuff but to talk about are we still going to get the building that we wanted
when we awarded them the contract and that became a very interesting set of conversations because
as you know they were talking to us about the design and the challenges and possible solutions
we were at the same time having conversations about the University and how the University
was evolving, about our growing ambitions, about what we wanted to do about how we teach and how
we research and things like that so that process was really helpful for the University
as well as giving us you know the quality of the building we've had, it was so important for
our thinking, it really changed our thinking as a university which is quite something
for a building to do. So much so that our new strategy for the University
we've named after the Town House, it's the Town House strategy which is where we want to take
the university in the next 10 years. And the reason for that is that in the building you have it's
everything that we want to do as a university so it, you know, you can be sitting in there
reading about law, you're looking down and across to someone who's reading
English literature and you're looking down and across again to see someone who's studying dance
and that's what we want to do as a university. A university is about not an ever narrower
focus on the thing you've chosen to study it should actually be about confronting you with ways
of thinking and ways of acting which are foreign to the thing that you're studying
because there's a lot of ways to understand the world, there's a lot of ways to act in the world
and there's a lot of forms of knowledge you know, dance at a university is because
dance is a form of knowledge and so to confront people with that which is what the building does
and to confront the public with what a university does that it's not just a seminar it's
not a university the way it might have been when you were at university, we are actually trying to
create people with different kinds of skills and help them really grow at their time at university
so that's why we've named the whole strategy for the University after the Town House because
the Town House is doing what we want to do as a university. Thank you.