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[Brogan Bunt] We see this end of the campus shaping up as a kind of cultural precinct, where this building provides a key node with a focus on the intersections between art and society.
[Annette Braunack-Mayer] This building again is a way in which we hopefully can come together, to both understand those big issues and to communicate about them differently.
[Nicholas Gill] So the sense of place for this building particularly here, below Mount Keira and all that Mount Keira embodies about the history of Wollongong and the people who have been here, across a whole different range of periods is really important and valuable for us.
[Brogan Bunt] This new building comes and it provides, just incredible facilities for our students, for enriching what we offer, for providing the most sophisticated, professional level, cutting edge, facilities across a whole range of programs.
[Nicholas Gill] There are two key spaces for geography, one is what we call our collaboratory, the other is the outdoor spaces. Our collaboratory is a place where we can come together, where we can work and have students coming in and doing their work, honours students, intern students, students working on projects with staff. It’s also a place where staff can come together and work together as well. The other important thing we have here is the outdoor spaces, and I think they are an important way to remind us of where we are in the landscape and in the environment.
[Brogan Bunt] Starting at the top were sitting here in this extraordinary music performance space, and if I just went through the doors there we’d get to music studios, that are again are fully professionally kitted out with hybrid analogue, digital recording facilities, linked to live rooms.
If we go down to the next floor its news rooms, so journalism has an empire down there with radio studios, as I said the newsroom and again a whole bunch of flexible teaching facilities. There are all sorts of facilities for graphic design or as we call it visual communication design, and for digital and social media, so there’s a maker studio space that enables people to create prototypes of technological inventions that they then reflect upon.
Then the bottom floor is an extraordinary space that has a dedicated major art gallery, probably the biggest in the whole region, not just in the institution, and we’ve got two significant performance theatres, plus a TV studio as well.
[Annette Braunack-Mayer] There are two new spaces here that will make a really big difference to our teaching, and to our research and they’re our two laboratory’s our occupational health and safety laboratory, and our social work simulation laboratory.
[Brogan Bunt] One of our primary interests in this facility is the capacity to engage with broader disciplines.
[Nicholas Gill] We’ve got a number of the big issues that are occupying our society right at the moment, we’ve got bushfires, we’ve got shark attacks and urban sustainability issues.
[Annette Braunack-Mayer] The biggest problems that we face as a society, are ones that you cannot solve simply by looking at them through one lens, and you need inter disciplinary perspectives to address things.
[Brogan Bunt] What we aim to do here is prepare students, not necessarily just for the current state of affairs, but we’re trying to prepare students for the future, for a changing industry where they can anticipate and invent possibilities further down the track.
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