Under construction: When complete, the New Engineering Building will comprise six storeys.

If all goes to plan, the Department of Civil Engineering will be moving into UCT's New Engineering Building (NEB) in November this year.

Construction on this building on upper campus started in August last year and should be completed by March next year, when the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment and the Faculty Office are expected to join civil engineering.

The Snape building - currently occupied by civil engineering - will be demolished over the Christmas holiday to make way for a new Teaching and Learning Building (TLB). Construction of this new building, which will house the Department of Construction Economics and Management (CEM) and will include nine multifunctional lecture theatres, a micro-lab, and a satellite campus of the Library Knowledge Commons, will start at the beginning of next year.

"The civil engineering laboratories as well as a new, spacious teaching laboratory will be housed in the basement of the building. Civil Engineering staff and postgraduate students will occupy the offices in the south end of the NEB," said deputy dean Associate Professor Neil Armitage, during a tour of the construction site earlier this week.

Armitage says that the main gains to the faculty will be the state-of-the-art lecture theatres (which will be part of the TLB), more space for the Departments of Chemical Engineering and the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics (through the move of CEM), and a dedicated Surface Science laboratory (for the electron microscopes) shared between three faculties and situated between the two larger buildings.