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Other Projects by A2 Architects
Eurocampus
Firm
Type
YEAR
2008
SIZE
100,000 sqft - 300,000 sqft
BUDGET
$1M - 5M
Sunday Times Culture Supplement - Architecture
A Dublin school that specialises in European-style education is top
of the class in design terms — an achievement all too rare in
Ireland, says Shane O’Toole
Hire them before they hire you, ran the slogan of a brilliant international
marketing campaign by IDA Ireland, the
republic’s inward foreign investment promotion
agency, in 1984. Focusing on youth and educational
attainment, the republic was successfully
rebranded as the home of the young Europeans, laying the
foundations for the tiger era.
A generation on, within an
enlarged EU and with a population that is ageing inexorably,
the Irish will never again be cast as the young
Europeans. If that epithet still has any meaning here, it might best
be applied to the students of a unique educational
experiment in the south Dublin suburb of Clonskeagh—Eurocampus,
designed by A2 Architects. Eurocampus is a joint
initiative of Lycee Francais d’Irlande (LFI) and St
Kilian’s Deutsche Schule (German school) to create “a
learning environment in which different European traditions
mutually enrich each other to create an awareness and
acceptance of diversity”. LFI opened in Dublin in
1967 as a primary school based on the French national
curriculum taught through French.
Named after the Irish saint
who brought Christianity to central Germany, St
Kilian’s was established in 1952 under the Save the German
Children Society, which fostered hundreds of German orphans
in Ireland after the war.
Co-educational and
non-denominational, it is a member of the network of German
Schools Abroad, promoting German language and culture among
its primary- and secondary level pupils, who follow the
Irish curriculum.
In 2001, LFI’s expanding secondary school relocated to the St Kilian’s campus in
Clonskeagh. Since 2005, the two schools have combined to
offer Irish, German and French pupils a joint course
leading to the Irish Junior Certificate examination. Youngsters
enrolled in the LFI section of the joint department also sit
the French national examination, Diplôme national de brevet,
which gives them the choice of then either continuing
their education within the Irish system or of working towards the
French Baccalauréat.
Three years ago, A2
Architects was asked, in competition with several more
established firms, to look at how 16 generic classrooms for
teaching languages, history and geography might be
accommodated on the site.
Eurocampus wanted more than
classrooms, however. It also wanted a new identity
and a new “front” to serve both schools. And the site was
challenging, a north-facing slope falling steeply away from
the road.
It was A2’s big break, a chance to move beyond the beginner’s world of domestic
extensions. Peter Carroll and Caomhan Murphy had set up A2
Architects the year before, in 2005, working out of Thin
Lizzy’s former rehearsal studio in Great Strand Street,
Dublin. “We felt we had somethingmore to offer,” says
Carroll. “We wanted to build and the economy was still strong.”
The business may have been a fledgling one, but Carroll
and Murphy had accumulated valuable experience since
graduating from UCD in 1995.
Carroll had worked with
O’Donnell+Tuomey, where he was a project architect on
both the award-winning Ranelagh multi-denominational school
and the furniture college at Letterfrack, before
moving to the Spanish studio of Rafael Moneo, chairman of
Harvard’s graduate school of design, to work on the
Banco de Espana headquarters in Madrid and the Fundacion
Beulas art gallery in Huesca, near Zaragoza. Murphy spent
several years with McHugh O’Cofaigh in Dublin, before
heading to Sydney to join Turner and Associates, working on
apartment towers and on the design of the Olympic
village there.
A2 had two weeks to come up with a concept for Eurocampus. In teasing out the various
possibilities, Carroll and Murphy went back to the
1982 competition designs for St Kilian’s and discovered a
promising site strategy among one of the losing entries.
Peter and Mary Doyle, who designed the country’s most
famous community school at Birr, Co Offaly, in 1980,
had proposed a giant ramp to link the upper and lower parts
of the difficult Clonskeagh site.
A2 borrowed the spirit of
the Doyles’ idea and ran with it. “We had both worked on
schools before,” says Carroll. “So we knew that as
classrooms are very tightly regulated, you have to work hard at
the in-between spaces, particularly the external spaces, to
provide the necessary quality.
That simple infrastructural
move — the big ramp — was the key to uniting the
whole school.” It created a legible spine linking all of the
building entrances on the campus.
Sloped sites usually create
extra costs but, by using the ramp to take up the height
difference between the two parts of the site, A2 could
also bring construction costs in line with those of a
standard site.
It is in creating the new Eurocampus identity that A2 has really excelled, however.
The original school building, which has been retained, is
a long, low, pitch-roofed structure running east-west
near the front of the site. The image it was after, in the
1980s, was one that would fit in with its suburban
surroundings—an enormous bungalow.
Eurocampus, on the other
hand, is more sophisticated, well-proportioned and
elegantly simple, and would not look out of place in a
21st-century, high-tech research park.
Five broad brick piers are
topped off by a steel-and-glass attic storey of classrooms
aligned with the eaves and ridge lines of the roof on the
original school. The parapet is set back to make the top of the
extension look extra sharp.
The large, stepped
forecourt is framed by a deep, tall canopy sheltering the
entrance. The sculptural portico recycles motifs familiar
from the republic’s ubiquitous mid-century national
schools, but with an optimistic, sunny continental air and a
civic scale that is invigorating.
Children should feel like
citizens coming and going. Diagonal views reveal a
garden behind — the new heart of the school, a focus for
old and new. Extra-tall classrooms face east and west, the
optimum orientations for schools, and are passively
ventilated to remove stale air. A larchclad garden pavilion is cranked
slightly to allow warm south light into the
classroom corridors. Everything has an air of effortless craft.
Built-in benches encourage pupils to gather and linger. Generous
windows are modelled on LeCorbusier’s Pavilion Suisse
(Paris, 1932) and Michael Scott’s Busaras (Dublin, 1953). The
railings of the open-thread terrazzo stairs are an homage to the
lost staircase of Pelican House, Dublin, demolished
at the turn of the millennium.
Suspended light fittings by
Targetti are stylish in the extreme. Above all, there
are no “wandering”, surfacemounted pipes and wires. Everything
has been meticulously controlled
with a calm authority.
Our school system is crying out for buildings of this calibre, but rarely gets it. Yet
costing Euro 1,750 per sq m to build, this development is
comparable in price to a standard secondary school. Quality, the great
intangible, need not cost extra but is only delivered
by the best architects.
During a recent site visit
to Eurocampus, organized for members of the
Architectural Association of Ireland, it was not lost on those present
that A2 Architects were fortunate indeed that the capital
cost of the new development was met by the French
government. Had the Irish been footing the bill, A2 could not have
been appointed, due to the Department of Education and
Science’s catch-22 policy of awarding school commissions
only to architects who have previously designed a
school. The irony is that having made such a success of
Eurocampus, A2 is now eligible to design schools for the department.
There must be a better way to encourage innovation and provide increased
opportunities for the next generation.
They do not lack either the
talent or the ambition. A lesson remains to be learnt.
A Dublin school that specialises in European-style education is top
of the class in design terms — an achievement all too rare in
Ireland, says Shane O’Toole
Hire them before they hire you, ran the slogan of a brilliant international
marketing campaign by IDA Ireland, the
republic’s inward foreign investment promotion
agency, in 1984. Focusing on youth and educational
attainment, the republic was successfully
rebranded as the home of the young Europeans, laying the
foundations for the tiger era.
A generation on, within an
enlarged EU and with a population that is ageing inexorably,
the Irish will never again be cast as the young
Europeans. If that epithet still has any meaning here, it might best
be applied to the students of a unique educational
experiment in the south Dublin suburb of Clonskeagh—Eurocampus,
designed by A2 Architects. Eurocampus is a joint
initiative of Lycee Francais d’Irlande (LFI) and St
Kilian’s Deutsche Schule (German school) to create “a
learning environment in which different European traditions
mutually enrich each other to create an awareness and
acceptance of diversity”. LFI opened in Dublin in
1967 as a primary school based on the French national
curriculum taught through French.
Named after the Irish saint
who brought Christianity to central Germany, St
Kilian’s was established in 1952 under the Save the German
Children Society, which fostered hundreds of German orphans
in Ireland after the war.
Co-educational and
non-denominational, it is a member of the network of German
Schools Abroad, promoting German language and culture among
its primary- and secondary level pupils, who follow the
Irish curriculum.
In 2001, LFI’s expanding secondary school relocated to the St Kilian’s campus in
Clonskeagh. Since 2005, the two schools have combined to
offer Irish, German and French pupils a joint course
leading to the Irish Junior Certificate examination. Youngsters
enrolled in the LFI section of the joint department also sit
the French national examination, Diplôme national de brevet,
which gives them the choice of then either continuing
their education within the Irish system or of working towards the
French Baccalauréat.
Three years ago, A2
Architects was asked, in competition with several more
established firms, to look at how 16 generic classrooms for
teaching languages, history and geography might be
accommodated on the site.
Eurocampus wanted more than
classrooms, however. It also wanted a new identity
and a new “front” to serve both schools. And the site was
challenging, a north-facing slope falling steeply away from
the road.
It was A2’s big break, a chance to move beyond the beginner’s world of domestic
extensions. Peter Carroll and Caomhan Murphy had set up A2
Architects the year before, in 2005, working out of Thin
Lizzy’s former rehearsal studio in Great Strand Street,
Dublin. “We felt we had somethingmore to offer,” says
Carroll. “We wanted to build and the economy was still strong.”
The business may have been a fledgling one, but Carroll
and Murphy had accumulated valuable experience since
graduating from UCD in 1995.
Carroll had worked with
O’Donnell+Tuomey, where he was a project architect on
both the award-winning Ranelagh multi-denominational school
and the furniture college at Letterfrack, before
moving to the Spanish studio of Rafael Moneo, chairman of
Harvard’s graduate school of design, to work on the
Banco de Espana headquarters in Madrid and the Fundacion
Beulas art gallery in Huesca, near Zaragoza. Murphy spent
several years with McHugh O’Cofaigh in Dublin, before
heading to Sydney to join Turner and Associates, working on
apartment towers and on the design of the Olympic
village there.
A2 had two weeks to come up with a concept for Eurocampus. In teasing out the various
possibilities, Carroll and Murphy went back to the
1982 competition designs for St Kilian’s and discovered a
promising site strategy among one of the losing entries.
Peter and Mary Doyle, who designed the country’s most
famous community school at Birr, Co Offaly, in 1980,
had proposed a giant ramp to link the upper and lower parts
of the difficult Clonskeagh site.
A2 borrowed the spirit of
the Doyles’ idea and ran with it. “We had both worked on
schools before,” says Carroll. “So we knew that as
classrooms are very tightly regulated, you have to work hard at
the in-between spaces, particularly the external spaces, to
provide the necessary quality.
That simple infrastructural
move — the big ramp — was the key to uniting the
whole school.” It created a legible spine linking all of the
building entrances on the campus.
Sloped sites usually create
extra costs but, by using the ramp to take up the height
difference between the two parts of the site, A2 could
also bring construction costs in line with those of a
standard site.
It is in creating the new Eurocampus identity that A2 has really excelled, however.
The original school building, which has been retained, is
a long, low, pitch-roofed structure running east-west
near the front of the site. The image it was after, in the
1980s, was one that would fit in with its suburban
surroundings—an enormous bungalow.
Eurocampus, on the other
hand, is more sophisticated, well-proportioned and
elegantly simple, and would not look out of place in a
21st-century, high-tech research park.
Five broad brick piers are
topped off by a steel-and-glass attic storey of classrooms
aligned with the eaves and ridge lines of the roof on the
original school. The parapet is set back to make the top of the
extension look extra sharp.
The large, stepped
forecourt is framed by a deep, tall canopy sheltering the
entrance. The sculptural portico recycles motifs familiar
from the republic’s ubiquitous mid-century national
schools, but with an optimistic, sunny continental air and a
civic scale that is invigorating.
Children should feel like
citizens coming and going. Diagonal views reveal a
garden behind — the new heart of the school, a focus for
old and new. Extra-tall classrooms face east and west, the
optimum orientations for schools, and are passively
ventilated to remove stale air. A larchclad garden pavilion is cranked
slightly to allow warm south light into the
classroom corridors. Everything has an air of effortless craft.
Built-in benches encourage pupils to gather and linger. Generous
windows are modelled on LeCorbusier’s Pavilion Suisse
(Paris, 1932) and Michael Scott’s Busaras (Dublin, 1953). The
railings of the open-thread terrazzo stairs are an homage to the
lost staircase of Pelican House, Dublin, demolished
at the turn of the millennium.
Suspended light fittings by
Targetti are stylish in the extreme. Above all, there
are no “wandering”, surfacemounted pipes and wires. Everything
has been meticulously controlled
with a calm authority.
Our school system is crying out for buildings of this calibre, but rarely gets it. Yet
costing Euro 1,750 per sq m to build, this development is
comparable in price to a standard secondary school. Quality, the great
intangible, need not cost extra but is only delivered
by the best architects.
During a recent site visit
to Eurocampus, organized for members of the
Architectural Association of Ireland, it was not lost on those present
that A2 Architects were fortunate indeed that the capital
cost of the new development was met by the French
government. Had the Irish been footing the bill, A2 could not have
been appointed, due to the Department of Education and
Science’s catch-22 policy of awarding school commissions
only to architects who have previously designed a
school. The irony is that having made such a success of
Eurocampus, A2 is now eligible to design schools for the department.
There must be a better way to encourage innovation and provide increased
opportunities for the next generation.
They do not lack either the
talent or the ambition. A lesson remains to be learnt.
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