Built Environment Facilities

The School of the Built Environment provides all its students access to world class facilities and software packages. Our staff will use their industry knowledge and experience to help ensure that you are equipped to participate fully and possessed with the equipment needed to support your studies.

The facility our students value most is not actually on campus, but is the location of the campus in the heart of Birmingham’s Eastside opposite the new High Speed 2 station construction, and minutes from dozens of fascinating live projects within the city centre.

Birmingham as it changes constantly on our doorstep really is our ‘living lab’. By simply looking out the window of our classrooms you’ll be able to witness live projects as they’re happening around us. You’ll constantly be inspired by dozens of fascinating case studies just from walking from the station to the campus.

The facilities on offer to our students reflect the work environment you will enter as you start your career. Learn more about what we have to offer below.

Software

Recognising the rapidly evolving digital built environment we are constantly reviewing software to best fit with the professions of the future.

Autodesk Accredited Centre Status, we use the latest integrated building modelling software across undergraduate courses, seeing Architectural Technology, Building Surveying, Construction Management, and Quantity Surveying students engaging in cross discipline information management projects modelling real life experience. Accredited Centre status allowing all students licence to download this software, and making available additional qualifications and certification to those demonstrating expertise and dedication to exploring their own and the limits of the Autodesk environment.

At course level, students engage with the latest and most appropriate software for their future professions. Real Estate students with CoStar, the leading industry database supporting valuations. Quantity Surveyors using Blue Beam, Revu and QS Pro, and along these Quantity Surveyors and Construction Managers use Synchro and Navisworks for 4D and CostX for 5D work. For Building Surveying and Architectural Technology routes, visualisation is important where Enscape, V-Ray Lumion and Sketch-up are available.

Built Environment Space in Millennium Point

The Built Environment Space in Millennium Point is available to all students with a huge resource of software-equipped laptops for loan on campus. For off campus working, much of the software we use comes with free student licences and all students will have access to the Windows Virtual Desktop, allowing access to our range of software from anywhere where the internet is available.

The Studio Space that we've created in Millennium Point is an open workspace where students can work on their design projects. We have all student work and examples that will change every week or month depending on what stage of a project we're at. And it's an open space for working on projects.

This is where our Architectural Technology students and our Building Surveying students in particular, spend a lot of their time.

Concrete and Hydraulics Labs

Our dedicated Civil Engineering facilities include a Hydraulics & Structures lab Concrete & Geotechnics lab as well as a bending rig.

The swollen concrete lab and hydraulics lab are the heart of our Civil Engineering course, where we have a range of test equipment. This is where our students can carry out experimental work as part of their course, either as part modules or using those labs to work on their final year project.

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Welcome to the faculty of computing engineering in the built environment. I'm Andy Aftelak I'm head of School of Computing and Digital Technology.

The Faculty of Computing Engineering and the Built Environment is an innovative faculty covering a diverse range of courses from mechanical engineering to digital film production. This video will give a brief insight into some of the cutting edge facilities our students can access throughout their studies. We have invested 340 million pounds in our facilities, including a major expansion of our city centre campus, our facilities in Millennium Point have undergone a six and a half million pound investment with a new maker space, engineering labs, equipment and I.T. equipment.

Here Students can utilise flexible open spaces to study, such as the Millennium Point Project Space, which hosts one of the largest collections of lab space in Europe.

This collaborative space also hosts a range of events, including hackathons and employability workshops, as well as our faculty's exclusive careers desk offering quality careers and employability advice for our students. Our makerspace on Level four is an informal area where you can do your project, you get lots of help from our technicians and there's loads of tools, laser cutters, 3-D printers, development tools.

There's also examples of past projects on display to inspire you in your own project.

Overall, we've got about 21 computer labs throughout the building crammed with state of the art computers that you can run almost any piece of software on. If you like networks and telecoms like me, then you'll love our four network labs. We've got state of the art equipment, switchers and routers that you can play with, real industry standard stuff. We've also got a system net lab where you can play with networks from anywhere you've got an Internet connection. If you really like audio and visual, you'll love all the equipment we've got in our digital technology labs.

On our campus we have TV studios that are used by the professionals. In Studio A we have a vast space, 14 by 17 metres wide with the double height studio and a 20 foot floor to grid. The space has been acoustically treated and equipped with a full lighting grid.

Studio A is perfect for students wanting to shoot productions requiring a large space.

Students have access to our Studio B with its green screen. This studio boasts the largest fixed green screen and MILO studio in the UK with a three wall Infinity Code, a perfect studio for Chroma key video production.

Studio C hosts an integrated TV set for interviews, media training, webcasts and set based productions.

You'll love our conservatoire. It really is a relaxed space, full of performance studios, full of equipment and stages. It's got some of the best recording studios in the country and you're going to have access to all of that.

My name is Nicki Schiessel Harvey, I'm a senior lecturer here at Birmingham City University in the School of the Built Environment. What's exciting about studying built environment at BCU is that you have these world class facilities as classrooms and the software packages we use, as well as the staff and their industry knowledge, combined with looking out the window at projects as they're happening around us and being right in the heart of the city, which is changing all the time. So just from walking from the station to campus, you're walking past half a dozen fascinating case studies.

Studio space that we've created in Millennium Point is an open workspace where students can be working on their design projects. We have all student work and examples that will change every week or month depending on what stage of a project we're at. And it's an open space for working on projects. And this is where our architectural technology students in our building, surveying students in particular, spend a lot of their time.

The swollen concrete lab and hydraulics lab are the heart of our civil engineering course, where we have a range of test equipment, where our students can carry out experimental work as part of their course, either as part modules or using those labs to work on their final year project.

Hi, my name's Chris Evans. I'm a senior technician in the School of Engineering in the built environment. So we pride ourselves on having industry standard facilities in all of our spaces, mechanical workshop facilities being one of them. We've invested heavily in industry, standard machinery, CNC machines, Firaxis milling machines, laser cutters, to name a few. And we've got industry standard kit in our electronics labs and in our advanced project labs. We have lots of brand new 3D printers for advanced manufacture.

One of the really interesting things that students can get involved in at the university is the formal student project, which encompasses the use of just about every bit of kit that we own in order for them to achieve their end goal, which is to race all weekend at Silverstone in the final showdown.

Because engineering is such a fast paced and continuously evolving profession to go into, we like to make sure that we maintain that pace and students can rest assured that they'll be studying and utilising equipment that is relevant for their future career. We pride ourselves on equipping every student that studies engineering at BCU with the skill set that they need not only working on industry standard equipment, but having those industrial links as well, which set them up perfectly for a career in engineering.

Whatever you are hoping to study, facilities in the faculty of computing, engineering and the built environment, provide a quality learning experience, preparing students for work in industry and shaping their future.

We hope to see you soon.