The University of Edinburgh is to proceed with its plans to construct a £60 million campus for its School of Geosciences following the appointment of John McAslan & Partners to carry out the design work after an international design competition.
The King’s Buildings campus will stretch to 20,000 sq m with a feature atrium at its centre to help facilitate visual and physical connections between departments, while encouraging communication between researchers by opening up teams that were previously closed.
Among the other features of the development is a reinterpretation of standard laboratory layouts to further enhance transparency between write-up areas, group rooms and offices as part of a general consolidation of disparate functions.
The University said in a statement: “At the heart of the building will be a central hub which connects the different parts of the building.
“This hub will be an inspiring and inclusive meeting space where staff and students can interact informally, where geographers meet climate scientists and ecologists meet geophysicists, where ideas, innovation, partnerships and friendships can flourish.”
The project is still in its early stages of development and detailed designs are set to be produced in due course.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Edinburgh is the most expensive city in the UK for students to live and work in, according to a survey conducted by the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The university was ranked as the least affordable because of its higher than average rental costs along with its lower than average term time income.
However, students of the university are still the highest social spending students and spend above the weekly average on alcohol.
The survey of 2,500 students across the UK took into account a range of factors including how much students spend on going out to how much time they spend studying.
