University College Dublin has grown so much that it's now a community the size of Arklow. With grand plans for its future, it is about to appoint architects to help its Belfield campus embrace the outside world. Gemma Tiptonasks if it's taking the right approach while, overleaf, some well-known alumni recall UCD's original base, on Earlsfort Terrace, which is officially closing next week
As the final academics and students leave Earlsfort Terrace, in central Dublin, next week and make their way to join their colleagues at UCD's Belfield campus, it's a good time to look at what's going on within those 320 acres that lie just four kilometres from the heart of the city.
In the 1930s, when Belfield House was purchased to create space for university sporting facilities, the area was considered to be rural. Wealthy Dubliners had for years built their country houses in such bucolic spots as Dundrum, Blackrock and Donnybrook, and it was to these places that they would escape from the thick of the city during the summer. In fact, the Belfield campus - which, with its 22,000 students and 1,000 academics, makes up a community the size of Arklow - is built on 11 such estates, and seven of the grand houses remain.
To the thousands who pass through every year, Belfield is a place of cement, stone, grass, trees, a lake and, of course, learning (with some parties and time in the bar thrown in). But for many thousands more, it's a bit of a mystery. With the Clonskeagh gate regularly closed to prevent it from becoming a commuter rat run, chances are you could live nearby all your life but never venture in. For many that still makes sense: the idea of the university as an ivory tower, to which academics retreat and to which students come to absorb the arcane mysteries of knowledge, is a romantic one, but one that is increasingly being challenged.
Indeed, it seems that the ethos of the university is changing, for at the same time as universities are examining the cost-effectiveness of their courses - as Trinity College Dublin apparently did earlier this year, when it announced it was ending its undergraduate acting degree - and scientific researchers are called on to find private funding, campuses are opening up.
As Hugh Brady, UCD's president, puts it: "For much of their history universities have been - and for very good reason - 'places apart'. Now, however, we are in a new reality, where interconnectedness - community and neighbourliness, if you prefer - is going to be the defining characteristic of successful organisations. This will apply in higher education and even to our cities as much as it will in business."
With this in mind, UCD's latest architectural initiative, which will appoint architects next month, is named the Gateway Project. Gateway looks to provide facilities, including an art-house cinema, for the community beyond the university's perimeters. As well as creating university accommodation, the competition brief calls for a hotel, shops, a creche, offices and a new pedestrian bridge across the N11.
Following an international competition, five firms have been shortlisted: two from the UK, Hopkins Architects and Zaha Hadid Architects, both based in London; two from Germany, Ingenhoven Architects from Düsseldorf and Behnisch Architects from Stuttgart and Los Angeles; and one from Norway, Snohetta from Oslo. Is it parochial to be perturbed that not one of the lead practices is Irish? (Behnisch has teamed up with Fitzgerald Kavanagh & Partners, a Dublin firm, for its submission.) Perhaps but that, coupled with the fact that no representatives from UCD's school of architecture, landscape and civil engineering were on the jury for the competition, doesn't say much for the university's confidence in its own talent.
It is probably truer to say, however, that UCD is looking for something iconic, something to define the college and put it on the architectural map. An Irish firm could have done that, of course, just as Grafton Architects is working on a major university building in Milan. Perhaps it is cultural insecurity that is responsible both for the wish that an Irish firm had been shortlisted and for the fact that one wasn't.
Nonetheless, the school of architecture has, as one of its professors (and former dean), J Owen Lewis, puts it, "a worldwide reputation as a design-led school". He says: "Tremendous debates about architecture take place in the tutorials and in the crits. That's why most of the practising architects who teach here do it. It's not for the money; for many it can be a refreshing relief from a morning spent arguing with fire officers."
The early days at Belfield were exciting for architecture. Winning two gold medals in a row from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland - one for Scott Tallon Walker's restaurant, in 1968-70, and one for Andrzej Wejchert's administration building, in 1971-73 - meant that, back then, one might have thought that Belfield was going to become a place where amazing new ideas in architecture could find space, thrive, inspire.
That, of course, didn't happen. For although UCD has many very fine buildings, including RKD's Quinn School of Business, O'Donnell & Tuomey's Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases, McCullough Mulvin's extension to the Virus Reference Laboratory and Scott Tallon Walker's Daedalus Building, an awful lot of characterless edifices give the campus the sprawling sense of a suburb instead of the more concentrated feel of an exciting centre of study. Part of that is the huge rise in student numbers. "No one," says Prof Lewis, "could have envisaged the campus would one day approach a population of 40,000." Continued on page 18
Denis Brereton of RKD describes the problems inherent in having too much space to work with. "Space is always an issue. Too much space undoubtedly represents just as great a challenge as too little. Constraint is a great master when it comes to designing anything. The risk of having an excess of space at one's disposal is that it can be squandered, whereas working within confined space can impose a tighter plan, which in turn may result in a better-scaled place."
Scale is a big issue. You see it in new squares, where architects and planners want to replicate the smaller gathering spaces that work so well in the older quarters of a city - only they do it by multiplying everything by 10 (or more), so what is created becomes a massive open area of grey stone where a couple of boys might desultorily kick a ball about or try skateboarding but where nobody would really want to gather, linger or hang out.
Gathering, lingering and hanging out - or, rather, dealing with the consequences of such activities - were at the heart of UCD's initial designs. Wejchert's winning plans for the whole campus, in the 1960s, coincided with the student unrest that led to the 1968 riots in Paris. UCD was initially designed to ignore the original country houses on campus; instead, it was built along a spine, with buildings structured to take on issues of crowd control. Now it needs to turn around and embrace crowd control's contemporary cousins of openness and accessibility.
It would be wrong to dismiss the campus on that basis, however. Hugh Brady plans to establish "a beautiful environment that inspires scholarship on the one hand but that is also welcoming to and engages the wider community", and his raw materials are, in the main, good. There are large areas of managed woodland, with beautiful mature trees; plans to remove the surface car parks and create multistorey blocks near each entrance mean the centre of the campus should become a traffic-free oasis; art works by Michael Warren, Rowan Gillespie, Patrick Ireland, Rachel Joynt and Daniel de Chenu are to be found about the grounds, as is a hidden Zen garden.
A new development, drawn up by Murray Ó Laoire in 2005, reimagines the campus as a series of zones, based on the original estate plans of the remaining 18th- and 19th-century houses (Roebuck Castle, Merville House, Belfield House, Ardmore House, Woodview and Richview; the seventh, White Oaks, being the university president's residence). These zones focus on teaching, learning and research, sport and leisure, innovation and residential uses.
The fact that UCD already has 2,700 residential units in three-, four-, five- and six-bedroom self-catering apartments underlines the idea that what is really required is town rather than campus planning. And town planning is definitely needed. Even with so many students living on site, there are remarkably few facilities for shopping and eating. Dublin may have spread its suburbs around Belfield, but to anyone living in, it is still an isolated place by evening.
When people think of university campuses, they often think of Oxford and Cambridge, which aren't campuses at all. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are made up of individual colleges - mini-campuses dotted around the towns. It is the small scale of these that makes them work so well; you can have the intimate quad, the sense of a manageable size, the feeling that, as a new student, you can make sense of the place without feeling too anxious.
In Ireland, University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin both have beautiful campuses where most of the newer additions blend well with the historic. Trinity has its architectural icon in the campanile, its 19th-century bell tower, while UCC's most recent, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery by O'Donnell & Tuomey, makes a statement without disrupting the way the existing buildings relate to one another.
So will Gateway provide UCD with its own iconic building, and can an iconic building pull together such a disparate campus? Whatever UCD decides to build, former Dublin city manager John Fitzgerald will be watching with interest. As chairman of Grangegorman Development Agency, he is charged with bringing the sprawling elements of Dublin Institute of Technology together, for the first time, on one of Dublin's final undeveloped sites. What will DIT be gaining by uniting on one site? And what will it be losing? Should Grangegorman be built along traditional lines around a quad? Need it have a bell tower? An architectural icon? Should it cater for community access or crowd control? The developments at UCD should point the way.
DESIGN STARS
Five architects have been shortlisted for UCD's Gateway Project:
Snohetta, Oslo
Projects include Baerum Cultural Centre, Norway; Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt; National Academy of the Arts, Norway; National Opera House, Norway; and WTC Cultural Centre, New York.
Hopkins, London
Projects include chemistry building, Princeton University; Dynamic Earth, Scotland; Jubilee Campus, University of Nottingham; Kroon Building, Yale University; Mound Stand, Lord's cricket ground, London; and Portcullis House, London.
Zaha Hadid, London
Projects include BMW headquarters, Germany; Phaeno Science Centre, Germany; Maxxi Centre for Contemporary Art, Rome; Ark Academy, London; and Zorrozaurre master plan, Bilbao.
Behnisch, Stuttgart and Los Angeles
(Working with Irish architects Fitzgerald Kavanagh & Partners.) Projects include Allston Science Complex, Harvard University; gateway project, Arizona State University; Genzyme Center, Massachusetts. Behnisch also worked on plans for Stadium Ireland, aka the Bertie Bowl.
Ingenhoven, Dusseldorf
Projects include Lufthansa Aviation Centre, Germany; European Investment Bank, Luxembourg; and Campus O2 headquarters, Germany.
MARKING THE MOMENT
From May 17th-19th UCD will host a series of events to mark the 124 years at Earlsfort Terrace. "Farewell to the Terrace"kicks off with a concert in the National Concert Hall on May 17th by John O'Conor, followed by readings from James Joyce by Gerry Stembridge, from Mary Lavin by Tom Kilroy, from Flann O'Brien by Joe O'Connor and a host of others. On May 18th, there will be an L&H debate between current students and former auditors on the vexed motion: that youth is wasted on the young. On May 19th, there will be a garden party and exhibition in Iveagh Gardens - it is sold out.
Conor Brady and Maeve Binchy's contributions are edited extracts from Farewell To The Terrace, a book of memoirs published by the college for €40. Phone 01-7161447. Full details of events at www.ucd.ie