Designed to enhance the student experience, the new 8,200m2 BSB Lyon Campus will open for the start of the 2025 academic year and will accommodate 2,500 students
BSB announces the start of construction work on its future Lyon campus. Located near the Grange Rouge – Santy tram stop in the 8th arrondissement, the 8,200m2 building will be able to accommodate 2,500 students from September 2025.
The project, which represents a total investment of more than €40m, is supported by a pool of financial partners. It is being carried out in collaboration with Carré d’Or, a Lyon-based builder and creator of living environments whose commitment guarantees responsible construction – perfectly aligned with BSB’s values and wishes. JLL is supporting BSB and Carré d’Or in this project.
Having been established in Lyon for 10 years, the School’s ambition with this new campus is to establish itself as the second largest business school in the city, by duplicating the model that has made it so successful to date, based on support and the student experience.
A Lyon-based and international ambition
“Having been in Lyon for 10 years, our School aims to continue its strong development in the heart of the city, and this new campus is an excellent way of achieving this“, says Stéphan Bourcieu, Dean of BSB. “Most of France’s leading business schools focus on Paris, but we want to stand out from the crowd and strengthen our commitment to Lyon, with the ambition of becoming the second largest business school in France’s second largest city.”
“We are convinced that our strategic choice is the right one. This choice is reinforced by the economic strength of the Lyon ecosystem, with its many head offices of national and international companies and its entrepreneurial and digital focus, to which we are particularly sensitive. It is also reinforced by the dynamism of our School, which this year obtainded the famous triple crown, joining the very select circle of leading business schools that hold the three internationally renowned accreditations AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA – less than 1% worldwide.“
Student and user experience
Stéphan Bourcieu continues: “This new campus is located at the heart of a rapidly changing district with a very dynamic student population. It will enable us to expand our portfolio of programmes, and in particular to develop a School of Creative Industries, drawing on our decades of expertise in cultural management. We will also continue to ramp up our work-study programmes, which are increasingly popular with students and companies alike. Ultimately, we will have two balanced pillars, with 2,500 students in Dijon and the same number in Lyon. By maintaining a human-scale model, we will above all be able to duplicate our expertise in terms of student support and experience – we are No. 1 in France in this area according to ChooseMyCompany in 2022 and 2023 – within a campus close to the Dijon model.“
Naturally, this campus will also be home to around a hundred employees, half of whom will be permanent lecturers and researchers. Its layout will be based on a strong resolution: to be a unique third place that integrates hybrid work spaces, meeting the needs of students, employees and visitors alike, by integrating a connection to nature, social spaces, learning and development spaces and modular spaces.
A responsible campus open to the city
The project is financially supported by a pool of partners close to the School. BSB is associated with Carré d’Or in the implementation of the real estate project, which gives it the assurance of a global vision materialised by economic, environmental, ethical and societal requirements – the company’s trademark. “It was important for us to be able to work with an entity like Carré d’Or, whose values of responsibility and quality of user experience are perfectly aligned with our own,” explains Stéphan Bourcieu.
As a result, the building will benefit from a series of environmental measures and standards to ensure that the campus is truly energy-efficient: connection to the urban heating network, timber-framed walls, a patio planted with trees and accessible as a cool island and a perimeter garden, photovoltaic panels on the roof, E3C1 certification and BREEAM Excellent certification, as well as a commitment to the Carrément Hexagonal© approach, which promotes local skills and short supply chains in order to create high-quality, 100% French living spaces.
This large-scale project has been thought through and shaped by long-term collaborative work with the 8th arrondissement town hall, the city of Lyon, the metropolis and all the departments involved. The building, designed by Sud Architectes, is part of a desire to carry on the memory of the site by combining the modernity of a state-of-the-art facility with a vigorous historical industrial tradition.
“The essential concept of modularity and adaptability led us to design a building made up of open-plan floors, linked by glazed walkways, and set on a base in which the reception and social functions will easily find their place while opening out as widely as possible onto the city,” explains Patrick Bowdler, one of the architects on the project. “This shape is also a way of providing transparent views, through the gardens, of the industrial site that marks the history of the district, and of preserving the beautiful existing trees that punctuate the campus street.“