1979 – Birr Community College, Birr, Co. Offaly

In 1974, the Irish Department of Education organised an open architectural ideas competition for the design of a new type of building – a ‘community school’. Birr Community School was commissioned from among the premiated concepts, intended by Peter and Mary Doyle as a flexible extendable building with generous social spaces including exterior courtyards and an interior street. As a result of their competition entry the Doyles were asked to design three schools, here at Birr, at Firhouse in Dublin, and one other.

Designed using portal frames for economy due to the increased area of the building envelope. According to Shane O’Toole: “The portal frames vary in height and width to accommodate different activities. There are four column heights and nine different bay widths, increasing in 900mm increments from 3.6m to 10.8m, creating a series of rich spatial experiences. It was all assembled using a tractor and a JCB. By the way, the 3.6m grid, which is half the normal dimension, is the same as used by Mies van der Rohe (with whom Peter studied and worked) at the IIT campus in Chicago.”

The street is the heart of the project and is punctuated by six courtyard spaces, giving light and views to the plan, around which are organised the social and group teaching areas. Classrooms occupy the perimeter of the building and each has natural light. There are two main entrances, one to the north for students arriving by bus, and one to the south, nearer to the town, for those arriving on foot or by bicycle.

The school was opened in January 1980 following the amalgamation of three schools around the town – two religious-run secondary schools and a vocational school. Designed to be extendable, it has been extended by around 20% over the years in phases, mainly around the perimeter of the original building and using the same design language.

Winner of the RIAI Gold Medal for the period 1980-82. The citation read “The merits of this building can be attached to numerous and varied architectural criteria: the imaginative transformation of a structural form hitherto associated with utility building types into a sophisticated system of order, the disciplined resolution of many functional and organisational problems called for in a complex brief, the further development of the system for a large building population while at all times avoiding any overt connotation of institution. [The school’s functional] success extends beyond user satisfaction to an expansion of the way of teaching.”