Campus Development Update - Clarice Pears Building nears completion
Published: 9 September 2022
The Clarice Pears building is set to open fully in Spring 2023
The newest addition to the University of Glasgow’s Western Campus Development Programme is the Clarice Pears building, which is set to be fully constructed in Q4 2022. Once constructed, the building will be prepared for a full opening to staff, students, visitors and the public in Spring 2023. The building bears the name of Clarice Pears, mother of the three founders of the Pears Foundation, which donated £5 million towards its construction.
Constructed on the site of the Western Infirmary, the Clarice Pears building will be the new home of the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University. The new site will bring together researchers from seven different groups and will enhance the reputation of the School, provide a fantastic location for research and teaching and foster greater cross-disciplinary work.
Integral to the new Clarice Pears building is community engagement with research. To this end, the ground floor has been designed to house interactive exhibits, temporary research exhibitions, seminars on health-related themes, networking events with community organisations and researchers, and opportunities for the local community to get involved in research such as patient and public involvement and lived experience panels.
An example of community focused research explored by the School of Health and Wellbeing is the FFIT (Football Fans in Training) programme where social scientists and public health scientists worked together to properly understand the hurdles to healthy living in men before developing an intervention that addressed these. More information on the FFIT programme, as well as other case studies on the work performed by the School of Health and Wellbeing can be found here.
The building has been designed with the mission to bring the outside inside, this is reflected in its aim to foster relationships with the community, and also in respect to the living wall, which drapes the atrium space in lush plant-life. The public and circulation spaces will be lined with plants and natural wood to soften the feel of the building and promote mental wellbeing.
‘Following years of planning and consultation, it is fantastic to see the Clarice Pears nearing the stage of completion and our vision for an accessible, inclusive, and welcoming space for users and visitors to the building come to fruition. We hope that with its meeting and social spaces and a changing places toilet that the Clarice Pears becomes part of the community and that the engagement in the public spaces and through the community hub will influence the learning, teaching and research in our School and lead to new coproduced research and social innovations in tackling health inequalities.”
Professor Sara Macdonald, Director of Engagement, Innovation and Enterprise.
Watch above: a computer-generated flythrough of the Clarice Pears ground floor, demonstrating the commitment to community focused research
The completion of the Clarice Pears is another exciting step along the University’s long-term vision to create incredible spaces for learning, research and collaboration. The Clarice Pears building will join the completed Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre (ARC) and the under-construction Adam Smith Business School on the Western Campus, all built with the aim of further enabling world-changing research.
University of Glasgow - MyGlasgow - Campus Development - Clarice Pears building
First published: 9 September 2022