The Constructionarium, pioneered by Imperial College London, is spreading rapidly amongst civil engineering schools in UK universities because it immerses students in the responsibilities of engineers: technical, financial and legal.

Student teams contract with a ‘client’ to build a structure of significant scale, such as a four-storey building, in one week, on a special site set aside for university use. This paper considers how the students learn about contracts and negotiation, through facing the physical consequences of their management decisions as they build their structure. The Constructionarium creates a complex learning event but one which is replicable in other countries with the right support from industry.

The paper considers how this complex event could be replicated outside the UK and its status as a means of teaching law and management as well as practical engineering.