Go-ahead for KTH’s new student building
KTH’s new student apartments are expected to be ready by the autumn 2013. They are being financed through a donation by the entrepreneur and hotel owner Bicky Chakraborty.
The construction of the building will start in the autumn on Drottning Kristinas väg, right next to the Swedish National Defence College. It will be a so-called container building with seven stories and a total of 42 apartments. The building will consist of prefabricated modules that are stacked on top of each other.
The container building will also have a penthouse with a glass roof, and at ground level there will be room for a community area and shops. Each container module houses a student apartment of approximately 26 m² which will include a bathroom and a kitchenette.
KTH Bostad will manage the apartments which will be rented out to international students on the KTH campus.
“Bicky Chakraborty’s student apartments are a very welcome addition to KTH’s campus environment. The availability of good-quality and well-situated student apartments is very important when competing for the best students. In addition, the building will make a significant contribution to creating the attractive and living campus environment that KTH today is actively planning to create,” says KTH’s President Peter Gudmundson.
The penthouse will be designed as a winter garden and it is suggested that it should be used as teaching and research premises or as a common area for the students. There are also plans to install solar panels on the glass roof to improve the building’s environmental profile and to reduce the building's energy consumption.
The container building is the second building that is being built by KTH which will be used for student apartments. Further down along the street, Drottning Kristinas väg 69-73, there are three buildings with 72 rooms which KTH makes available to international students.
The three buildings are administered by Familjebostäder and received a temporary building permit when they were erected in 2004. Bengt Sedvall, Real Estate Manager at KTH, expects that the building permit will be made permanent when the application is submitted next time. In addition, there are also six apartments on Teknikringen 60-68 that are rented out to students.
KTH also has a more long-term plan to increase the number of student apartments on campus. In a proposal that was recently approved by KTH’s board and which received support from Stockholm stad, a further 554 student apartments and a hotel with 126 rooms will be built.
The entrepreneur Bicky Chakraborty who will be financing the construction of the container building has previously contributed to KTH’s operations with a donation for a professorship in product and service design in 2006.
“I see this as a logical continuation of my previous commitments with regard to the research that is being carried out at KTH. KTH is Sweden’s foremost university of technology with leading edge competence within several important areas. It is extremely satisfying to be able to strengthen this environment through the provision of new student apartments”, says Bicky Chakraborty in a press communiqué.
Text: Christer Gummeson
