This is not your usual university building. It is a place where the grit of industry meets the campus mentality, out in the Warwickshire countryside in the English Midlands. It is the latest and largest in a sequence of buildings that London-based Cullinan Studio has designed for the Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University since the early 1990s, and which now constitutes an industrial-training campus within a campus. The National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC) deals with the thinking behind the kind of emission-free and autonomous vehicles that are still some years away from entering production.

The building’s occupants, representing industry, research, and academia, would typically be housed in separate facilities. The idea is that innovation comes when ideas are shared. For the manufacturers, the NAIC brings together facilities that had previously been scattered throughout the region, which is the traditional heartland of the British automotive industry. It aims to accelerate the shift to green transport, and to bring forward the design and engineering brains of the future.