As far as top 10 lists go it’s niche, but until last month, East Asia could boast seven of the 10 tallest buildings used primarily (at least 90 per cent) for education. Now there is a new kid on the block. Madrid’s 180-metre-tall IE Tower has muscled into 3rd place, splitting Tokyo’s Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower and Nagoya’s Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers, and pushing buildings in Shanghai, Jinan and Bangkok down a peg. The arrival of the tower, built for the IE University, was announced at a dazzling opening ceremony on October 19 attended by the King of Spain, Felipe VI. As well as uniting all of the university’s hitherto scattered Madrid operations under one (very high) roof, the move sees the base of the institution move to the capital from Segovia – a historic town 90km to the northwest, where IE retains a campus, in a 13th century former convent. It’s also hoped that the tower and its inhabitants will play a significant role in regenerating northern Madrid into an area that is functional for residents and local workers as well as being a draw for tourists and other visitors to the city. That appears to be a tall order at the moment, not least because the university building and four neighbouring towers occupy a plot in the city’s financial district that is cut off from other parts of the city by the Paseo de la Castellana and other major roads, a large hospital and a big park. How Copenhagen’s Nordhavn is a blueprint for sustainability Martha Thorne, dean of the IE’s School of Architecture and Design, agrees that the topography isn’t ideal. “The landscape around the five towers is nice in photographs but it doesn’t have either a message or a functional underpinning that relates to the people who inhabit the towers or the surrounding community,” she says. Nevertheless, she believes the needs of up to 6,000 students as well as faculty members will breathe life into the area. “There will be shops, there will be restaurants, but there will be space for pop-up markets. There will be space, I’m sure, for outdoor activities … Friday evenings dancing on the lawn. “Students, faculty and staff will be able to colonise those spaces around [the tower] in the way that embassies and hotels are not able to do. And hopefully our activities will be of interest to other people.” In the longer term, Thorne points to the planned redevelopment of Chamartin, the district on the far side of the multi-lane Castellana. Madrid Nuevo Norte is billed as the largest urban regeneration project in Europe and is intended to transform what is now railway sidings and an industrial wasteland. “More than 50 per cent will be public areas – and one of the ideas put forward was to connect that part with the five towers, covering over the Castellana and making a pedestrian roof, putting the highway underground and making that [roof] walkable.” The Instituto de Empresa (IE) was established as a business school in Madrid in 1973. It grew to become a private university and now offers English-language study programmes in a range of subjects that include finance, economics and trade; technology and data; international affairs and public policy; and design and architecture. More than 75 per cent of its student body come from overseas and one alumna is Colombian Natalia Bayona, the director of innovation, education and investment at the United Nations World Tourism Organisation. “I attended IE University twice,” says Bayona. “First for an executive course on innovation and digital transformation for tourism and then, during 2014 and 2015, I did an executive MBA at IE’s Business School.” “This MBA forged in me a truly global vision, plus a fascination for fostering cutting-edge technology, especially in tourism.” In a typical year, between 60 and 100 students from Greater China enrol in the university, says Pablo Sun Li, the Beijing-born associate director of communications at the IE Business School. IE has partnered with the likes of Tianjin University in attempts to better understand the Chinese economy and its growth. “The very first exchange agreement I was able to make for undergraduate students at IE was with Hong Kong University,” says Thorne. Not surprisingly, life has been a little unusual for students and faculty members alike during the pandemic. Although IE was one of the world’s first institutions to resume face-to-face classes, in June 2020, the university has had to pioneer the concept of “liquid learning”, uniting students on campus with colleagues around the world and enabling them all to participate not only as part of the same cohort, but also in (or looking in on) the same classroom. As befits education in the time of climate crisis, sustainability is a concept that is being drummed into those students, according to many of the speeches given at the IE Tower launch event. But was building a new tower – albeit one with LEED Gold certification – really the most sustainable way of bringing IE’s Madrid operations under one roof? “Reusing old buildings is a great thing to do – as we do in Segovia,” says Thorne. “[But] of the size of the tower, there are not many buildings in Madrid that can accommodate that many students. The institution did look at an existing building [ …] but we were unable to acquire it or to rent it.” Flexibility, she stresses, has been built into the tower – which possesses impressive meeting, rehearsal, sporting and canteen facilities – so it can function as a venue catering to the needs of local communities, as well as, perhaps one day, tourists. “Madrid is a city that does not concentrate its tourism in a single area, but rather offers a wide range of leisure, sports, cultural, historical and gastronomic attractions throughout the city,” says Bayona. “The IE Tower will allow the city to include an innovation and entrepreneurship-oriented asset that will also be of interest to visitors.”