For the last visit of the summer, twenty CovSoc members were given a tour of the new Delia Derbyshire Building – and they loved it!
On 6th September our colleagues at Coventry University hosted a visit to the university’s newest building. The Delia Derbyshire Building is the heart of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and is home to some of the most up to date facilities for students.
The building cleverly joins together the former Graham Sutherland and the Maurice Fosse buildings, with a huge atrium and a hyper studio and suspended studios in between. This area will be open to the public and will include a café and links to a new gallery fronting onto Cox Street.
The building is designed to reflect and acknowledge the history of the university, which started its life as a design college supporting the city’s ribbon weaving industry. Several of the walls and ceilings are clad with scaled up replicas of the original Jacquard Loom cards from the famous Coventry Ribbon, a specimen of which is located in the Herbert Museum.
We were shown a wide range of studios and workshops including games making, film making, immersive sound, virtual reality, printing, modelling and manufacturing. We were impressed that the facilities are used by a wide range of different course arranged by the faculty.
We were also impressed by the university’s focus on providing modern, state of the art, software and hardware that enables students to gain up to date experience of the work environment whilst at university.
When we visited the building there weren’t many people around, but all that will change on Monday when the students arrive for their first experience of the building.
