2 Nov
2010
Yesterday I had the privilege of a personal tour of the awesome new Ravensbourne building on Greenwich Peninsula. "Welcome to the future of higher education" promised our guide, Head of Enterprise and Innovation Chris Thompson, and he did not disappoint. It's a radical building, housing a radical approach to learning that gives me hope for Britain's chances in the digital industries of the 21st century.
The building itself is stunning. The patterned facade and angular aesthetic is the perfect counterpoint to the adjacent Millennium Dome. And, quite conciously, nothing about it says "higher education institution". There's not even any signage on the outside. It makes you curious, a trait no doubt encouraged in the students.
Positioned a few minutes walk from North Greenwich tube station, the building is ideally placed for the Olympics-inspired Thames Gateway developments, but still has quick links to the old hubs of the City and West End. This location is a great metaphor for Ravensbourne as a key node in a network of learning and enterprise; an organisation geared for collaboration.
Once inside this sense of collaboration and openness gets stronger. Sat in the public atrium foyer was like viewing a cross-section of a fantastic ant colony of learning. Students hurried up and down open stairways, seminars could be spotted in open spaces on the second floor, and a half-drawn panel of sliding doors revealed a main lecture space that opened out into the atrium where we sat. All of this was presented with a striking clean interior design that compels students towards industriousness. It seemed to say, "this is where you build the future: now get started."
To build the future, you need the right kit. Ravensbourne's state-of-the-art equipment had the gadget-boy in me salivating. There were the big things like the TV studio and facilities (the most advanced in Europe) and the recording studio (available to bands playing at The O2 Arena should the urge come over them). The small things were just as impressive. Students could do an impromptu show-and-tell by plugging into a hallway TV screen's HDMI port; printing to your printer of choice is done with a swipe of the student ID card; a hand-held 3D scanner could model both form and texture, which could then be printed to a 3D printer.
Amongst all this gadgetry there is a library, but it's ran on a kind-of honesty system with no librarians. Saving money in this way makes a lot of sense when the previous library only had one book taken out every three weeks. As Chris put it, the students want knowledge not books. In the digital world knowledge often comes iteratively, so Ravensbourne has large prototyping labs with the tools of different crafts placed together to encourage cross-pollination and experimentation.
The learning style complements the hardware and software of the building. Seminars and lectures take place in open areas and music plays in the background of a fashion workshop. There are courses on enterprise and the students own collaborative work spaces are cleverly placed next to desks rented to start-up businesses.
These things are the Ravensbourne way, and seeing this innovative learning style in its new home one can start to make sense of what's happening here in its recent historical context. The building's neighbour, the Dome, was a structure filled to celebrate the young, confident Britain of New Labour, yet now it hosts the global corporate music circus that is the O2 Arena (I'm pretty sure Jedward are not the future we all hoped for back then). Encircling the Arena are the identikit cafés and restaurants that have sucked the life out of Britain's public spaces. And beyond rises that mega-symbol of the industry that did most to bring us to our current nadir, Canary Wharf.
Ravensbourne's new building suggests a new direction; aware of it's historical neighbours, but more human, collaborative, creative and enterprising. Everyone should wish it luck.
