New Building opened at Clare Hall

The Salje Building, named after the former President of the College Professor Ekhard Salje and his wife, Lisa Salje, consists of thirteen student rooms and five flats for Visiting Fellows.

Professor Ekhard Salje, former President of Clare Hall, developed over his term as President close links and partnerships with a number of prestigious universities in Korea, China and Japan, who between them have helped to fund the new building.

Sir Martin Harris, the current President, said at the opening:

“What is now the Salje Building began as a gleam in Ekhard’s eye, a plan to further enhance the range of quality of Visiting Fellows who make Clare Hall so special.

“The idea of asking a number of universities, above all in East Asia, to invest in a new building as the necessary infrastructure to enable us to broaden still further our Visiting Fellow programme, proved in the end to be a real winner, and here we are today, with a building built and paid for, as well as a splendid new meeting room, because of his vision and commitment. Ekhard, the College will always be in your debt.”

In the next few years Clare Hall plans to develop a series of study and research programmes, with enhanced interaction between the College’s Fellows, Visiting Fellows and students in a small number of carefully-chosen inter-disciplinary subject areas, and also plans to welcome graduate students from partner universities to its developing summer school programme.

It is hoped that those universities whose generosity has helped to make this new building possible will have a particular role to play in these activities.

In his own speech the Vice-Chancellor said: “This building adds brilliantly to Clare Hall’s facilities, and has great force as a symbol. It carries into the future the generosity of the many partner institutions which have contributed to its construction, and whose investment and friendship with Cambridge is so welcome; it is testimony too to the commitment of Clare Hall to the interaction between students and the many Visiting Fellows who bring such distinction and such interest to Cambridge.”

The contributor universities, some of which were represented at the opening, are Seoul National University, Konkuk University, Sungkyunkwan University, Hanyang University in Korea; The Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at the University of Tokyo, Doshisha University and Kobe College in Japan; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Macau and King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.

Additional generous funding for the building, designed by architects Cowper Griffith, came from the Wolfson Foundation, BP and Trinity College.

Clare Hall is a College for Advanced Study in the University of Cambridge. It is a community that welcomes graduate students and senior scholarly visitors and their families from all over the world. It is a centre where interaction is valued, rather than hierarchy, and the family-friendly accommodation in the College grounds provides a pleasant and informal environment for the diversity of talented graduate students and distinguished senior academic visitors. 

The College buildings are located on two main sites in Herschel Road amongst the leafy gardens of West Cambridge, close to the University Library and mid-way between the old Colleges in the town centre to the East and the new university developments adjacent to the Cavendish Laboratory in the West.