Cover Image: The new ECU City Campus rises over Yagan Square, signalling a bold era for arts, technology and industry collaboration in Perth. Photo supplied.

The dream of every artist, musician, performer, technical and design expert is to find themselves in an inspirational space that offers all the best tools. That space is Edith Cowan University (ECU) City Campus, starting in the main foyer where a huge LED screen wraps around several walls and four floors to resemble the futuristic film set of Blade Runner.  
 
The screen is intended to be largely programmed by students, including dancers, actors, film students and AI content makers who will collaborate to create new work. That experience alone will be a precursor to the new digital age in which many will end up working.

“The screen – all 400 square metres of it – wraps around the corner so if you’re looking from Yagan Square, you see the image coming out towards you,” says ECU Vice Chancellor Clare Pollock, whom I’ve arranged to meet in the main foyer. “It’s extraordinary.” 

We climb up a series of stepped platforms designed for social lounging and student group study. We draw breath at some ten metres’ elevation and sit down to talk. 
 
“It is one of the most extraordinary spaces that is investing in the creative and performing arts,” Pollock tells me proudly. “I don’t know anywhere else in the world that a university campus is making that the central theme.” 
 
Our curious vantage point provides clues to the way that this $853 million building is explicitly designed for interaction. We turn and look above us to second floor balconies where business and law students will share usage of study booths, tables and glassed-in classrooms with their creative arts’ peers. 

Melbourne-based firm Lyons, led by architect Neil Appleton, responded to their brief with unorthodox gathering spots and minimal inside walls,  a material rejection of the academic school ‘silo’ model of yesteryear. The new academic aim is for a kind of hothouse blooming, pollinated by ideas from students sharing their lunch or project table with other schools of learning. 

“The real potential and the way we’ve constructed the building has been all about connection,” says Pollock. “Connecting our creative and performance artists, our technology, law  and business academics, into the future.  
 
“Universities often work in silos, and that can create excellence, but real innovation and real excitement happens when you get the intersection between the two.” She cites the example of ECU’s sports science experts, located at the university’s Joondalup main campus, “who are looking at how you can educate our musicians and future musicians to look after their body for long-term benefit.” 
 
Such aspirations can only be tested over time. Factually, this building can claim the most state-of-the-art facilities in the nation – eight public performance theatres, broadcast studios, acoustic labs, recital hall, dance studios, a ground level art gallery and a moot court. 

Over one hundred Yamaha pianos are being installed in music booths; occupying its own suite is the Aboriginal Performance Studio (which has produced screen actors like Lila McGuire, currently starring in the ABC TV series Goolagong). The Beck Square Piano, part of a collection of priceless historic pianos, among some 130 donated antique instruments, will also find a home in the city campus.

A lot will be asked of this remarkable building, which incidentally claims to have 30% lower carbon emissions than the old ECU Mt Lawley campus it has replaced. Apart from turning out a new breed of lateral-thinking artists and business types, Perth’s first ever inner-city university campus is also tasked with ‘activating’ the city around it. 
 
‘Activate’ is a woefully overused word that rarely translates into reality. But under the terms of a $1.8 billion Perth City Deal, a collaboration between ECU and the Australian and West Australian governments, the new building will be expected to inject new life into Perth, the city once known as Dullsville. Already, the building has prompted an upward spike in student beds in the CBD, from 2000 in 2021 to 6000 beds finished or under construction. 
 
But back to the actual learning. ECU City Campus will be operated under a new curriculum called programmatic learning, says Pollock. “Rather than thinking about separate components of knowledge – ones you demonstrate in a test or an exam – the focus is on learning and then the assessment is about integrating across those different elements of your learning.” 

She likens it to teaching about theatre – a student learns different components, from lighting and stage design to actual performance.
“When they put on a drama production, it requires integration across all of those areas,” she says. 
 
“It’s natural in terms of performing arts but in a business environment, it then looks a little bit different working with an external client or a business to help address their problems.”
 
Only time will tell if this massive edifice overshadowing Yagan Square changes Perth in any significant way. Will it turn out the innovative thinkers and global citizens of creativity that Pollock hopes to produce? We can only be optimistic. 
 
As Orientation Day approaches, and the first students walk through the door, ECU’s City Campus looks and feels like a place where technology, industry and creativity can spectacularly collide.