Arts University Bournemouth Innovation Studio

Arts University Bournemouth traces its roots to 1880, when it began as the Bournemouth Government School of Art. It spent over a century restyling itself through incremental name changes, Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, then the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, then Arts University College Bournemouth, before finally reaching full university status in 2012. Among its more striking additions is the Innovation Studio, designed by Peter Cook of CRAB, a red, orange and yellow building fitted with ‘eyelid’ shutters that let each group of resident businesses signal its own mood of privacy or exposure.

The Design Engine-designed Student Centre followed a similar instinct: architecture as personality rather than backdrop, a set of buildings meant to feel like a working part of the creative process rather than a container for it. AUB now counts Edgar Wright and Simon Beaufoy among its alumni, proof that a school built on eight decades of incremental rebranding eventually found a name, and a facade, that actually fit.