I recently had the opportunity to tour Edith Cowan University’s remarkable new City Campus with Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Paulo de Souza, together with the Engineers Australia team including Susan Kreemer Pickford, Adam Kinnest, Kieran Rutter, Michael Bell and Allison Selman.
The new $853 million campus represents a significant investment in both the future of higher education and the continued revitalisation of Perth’s CBD. When fully operational, it will bring more than 10,000 students and staff into the city each day, alongside more than 300 Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) performances each year. Beyond its educational purpose, the campus will become an important contributor to the economic, cultural and social life of Perth.
What struck me most, however, was not the scale of the development or its impressive architecture.
It was the philosophy behind its design.
For many years, universities and industry have recognised the importance of breaking down disciplinary silos. Collaboration has become something of a mantra, yet organisational structures often continue to separate engineering, technology, business, law and the creative industries into distinct faculties and buildings.
ECU has taken a different approach.
The new campus has been deliberately designed to bring these disciplines together, creating opportunities for students and academics to interact, collaborate and solve problems across traditional boundaries.
That matters because Australia’s biggest challenges are rarely purely technical.
Whether we are addressing energy transition, healthcare, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, defence or productivity, the challenges are ultimately human. They require outstanding engineering and scientific capability, but they also demand creativity, communication, empathy, commercial understanding and design thinking.
Innovation rarely emerges from a single discipline. More often, it occurs where different perspectives meet.
One feature that particularly resonated with me was the campus’s striking golden staircase, inspired by the flowing form of a brass instrument. It serves as a powerful reminder that creativity has not simply been accommodated within the building. It has been embedded into its very fabric.
The decision to place WAAPA alongside engineering, technology and business sends an equally important message. Creativity is not an optional extra to technical education. It is an essential ingredient in innovation, helping us imagine new possibilities, communicate complex ideas and develop solutions that genuinely improve people’s lives.
The campus itself reinforces this philosophy through shared learning spaces, informal meeting areas and collaborative environments designed to encourage interaction between students from different disciplines. These are the kinds of spaces where new ideas emerge naturally and where future engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and business leaders learn to solve problems together.
The benefits extend well beyond education.
By bringing thousands of students, academics, staff and visitors into Perth’s CBD each day, the campus is already helping to reshape the city. It will support local businesses, activate public spaces and strengthen Perth as a vibrant destination to live, work, study and create.
As Chair and National President of Engineers Australia, I often speak about the importance of preparing engineers for a future that is becoming increasingly interconnected and multidisciplinary. The ECU City Campus is an excellent example of how the physical environment can support that ambition by fostering collaboration, curiosity and innovation from the very beginning of a student’s journey.
Congratulations to everyone involved in delivering such a bold vision, and my sincere thanks to Professor Paulo de Souza for a fascinating and insightful tour.
I left optimistic, not only about the future of engineering education, but about the kind of graduates Australia will need to help solve the complex challenges of the decades ahead.
