Engineers get first look at new digs

The new City Campus building will incorporate leading-edge technologies.

Auckland University today released an image of its planned $281.9 million engineering faculty building.

The 1960s building on the site will be demolished to make way for the new building which will be 11 storeys compared with the existing five.

Key features will be access from Grafton Rd into a large open atrium space and a roof-top facility for telecommunications and environmental monitoring.

Peter Fehl, property services director, said the new building would be 30,000sq m or 3ha of new City Campus floor space. Students would move to other university buildings while this process was under way.

Engineering post-graduates already have newly rebuilt facilities on the Newmarket campus after the Lion Breweries site was purchased.

Dean of Engineering Nic Smith said the new City Campus engineering building was a big step forward.

"The new building has a level of engineering design that means students are in an environment where sophisticated engineering concepts and leading-edge technologies are simply part of the building itself," Smith said. "It also gives us unprecedented flexibility, not only in the way we use teaching spaces but in our ability to incorporate multi-disciplinary learning spaces where students from different departments are exposed to the full range of engineering sciences and disciplines."