Projects

(If you are looking for further information about the projects currently running, please go to the Innovative Collaboration page.)

We initiated Build Up at the University of Westminster for two very good reasons. First and most obviously to support built environment professionals during the recession. Second, to begin to address the skills shortages in the built environment, particularly in the area of urban regeneration and low carbon solutions.

All professions are notoriously defensive about their boundaries, and built environment professionals are no different in drawing lines between which bits of knowledge and expertise they own. The problem is that the built environment itself, in all its complexity, does not lend itself to being divided up into simple chunks of expertise. What is needed is a new type of urban professional, who is alert enough to cross professional boundaries and join up the bits.

The ambition for the project strand of Build Up was that we would begin to initiate such thinking by assembling groups of diverse professionals, each with no particular axe to grind, and each willing to learn from each other. Of course multi-disciplinary teams are often assembled to deal with urban complexities, but it is usually the case the tasks are assigned according to professional skills. In Build Up projects this division is neither necessary nor relevant. The evidence from the outputs from the teams is that this small experiment in true interdisciplinary working has been very successful, and it acts as marker of the wider ambition of Build Up.

Professor Jeremy Till
Dean of Architecture and the Built Environment
University of Westminster