The University of Otago’s biggest building project, an eight-storey home for its Christchurch medical campus, will be officially opened this week after years of delays and cost rises that have roughly doubled its price since firm plans were released in 2018.
The building, called Wai Ora, sits beside the Avon River in central Christchurch, a short distance from Christchurch Hospital. It will bring together a campus that has been spread across 11 buildings and will accommodate 1500 students and staff, RNZ reported on Tuesday.
Official opening ceremonies are set for Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September, according to a University of Otago media release issued in June. The building is expected to be in full use by October.
Professor Suzanne Pitama, head of the Faculty of Medicine and the project’s owner, told RNZ the building was a love letter to Christchurch. “Just symbolising that we intend to stay for at least another 53 years, and continue with research and service within the community,” she said.
The university set up its Christchurch campus in 1973, its first outside Dunedin. Over time it spread across multiple buildings around central Christchurch, and early plans to bring it together started before the Christchurch earthquakes. According to the university, the then dean of the Christchurch campus, Professor Peter Joyce, saw the benefits of consolidating, and when a site close to the hospital-based campus came up for sale after the earthquakes he led its purchase. As it turned out, the site also falls within the city’s planned health precinct.
The people moving in include medical students in the clinical years of their degree, final-year physiotherapy students, nursing students and medical researchers. The university says the building will also be a hub for nursing and health science postgraduate students. Clinicians who work closely with the hospital will stay in the existing university building, which is connected to Christchurch Hospital.
There are no lecture theatres in Wai Ora. Pitama told RNZ “there are no lecture theatres here, it is all flat floor teaching because that is the way of the future, the way we are teaching now”. Alongside expanded research laboratories there is an enhanced clinical trials unit and a six-bed simulation centre for medical training. The university says the extra room lifts teaching space by 20 percent, and RNZ reported student numbers are expected to rise by 20 percent.
Pitama said the clinical trial labs were designed so the people of Christchurch “can benefit from having access to treatments that aren’t publicly funded at the moment”. In the June release she said the building would expand the university’s research and clinical trials across health problems ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease, adding that “Wai-Ora has been designed to bring researchers, clinicians, educators and students together in a way that strengthens the pathway from discovery to patient care.”
Professor Logan Walker, associate dean of research, said the new building would allow people to collaborate with ease. “What these new labs do is they break down those walls. They open up groups so that we are mixing together, we are sharing knowledge, sharing equipment, sharing ideas,” he told RNZ.
PhD candidate Rose Harper, the student representative on the building committee, said she and other students were very excited to be moving in. “I’ve never been in a facility like this in New Zealand,” she said.
The building has taken longer and cost more than first planned. When the university released its plans in 2018 it put the building at $150 million, with construction to start the following year and finish by 2022, the NZ Herald reported in July 2022. By 2020 the estimate had climbed to $170 million. By the time Christchurch builder Leighs began enabling work in mid-2022 the project was being described as “$220 million-plus”. Tanya Syddall, then the university’s director of capital projects and operations, said there had been no significant design changes and the rising cost could not be avoided. “The Covid-19 pandemic and other external factors have created significant impacts around the world for supply chain, resourcing and cost escalation of goods and services,” she said.
In June this year the Otago Daily Times reported the university council had approved a budget of $280 million, with the estimated cost at completion $292.5 million. Pitama told RNZ this week the final cost had come to about $300 million, all of it paid for by the university. That is about twice the 2018 figure, and the building is opening four years after the first planned finish date.
The university says the tight inner-city location required complex excavation, de-watering and structural work before the building could rise.
The name Wai Ora means “water of life”. It was gifted by Professor Te Maire Tau, leader of Ngāi Tūāhuriri, a subtribe of Ngāi Tahu, according to architects Warren and Mahoney, who designed the building. They say it reflects the central place of water in Ngāi Tahu creation traditions. The building is laid out as two blocks around a glass-roofed atrium, with a curved northern wing overlooking the river for offices, meeting and learning spaces, and a more heavily serviced southern block for technical laboratories. Carved posts at the entrance feature patterns representing the waterways of the nearby Avon River.
For the university, the opening closes a long chapter. “This has been a long journey involving the vision and commitment of many people over many years, and it is incredibly rewarding to see that vision becoming a reality,” Pitama said in June.
Have you studied, worked or taken part in a clinical trial at the University of Otago’s Christchurch campus? Tell us what the new building means to you in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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