UCD Belfield Campus

I last heard of possible changes to the campus about a year ago. At that stage it was proposed to put a relatively tall building at the N11 boundary of the campus as a landmark and to realign the entrance to prioritise pedestrians and redirect traffic into underground (?) carparks. UCD was designed as a pedestrian priority environment and had worked pretty well in this regard, but the main N11 entrance was always unsatisfactory in this regard. I think part of the plan a year ago was also to build along the line of the footpath that runs from the N11 to the O’Reilly Hall, making it into a sort of ‘urban street’ with dry cleaners, shops etc. and strengthening the sense of arrival.

I’m all for most of the new changes, though the development of a hotel on site using private money, to be privately run, gives me cause for concern. Don’t know if it’s going ahead any more as I haven’t heard much about it lately, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it’s still very much on the cards but has been hushed up by President Brady, the President Of the People (TM), a man renowned for putting the needs of the students first.:rolleyes:

Not sure on what you say about the Science Buildings though- they were re-clad about five years ago and have just been extended over the last two years. It would be strange if they were to go so soon. I’ve always liked them too- they have a simple 1960s charm in conception/plan (central building with a block each for Biology, Physics and Chemistry) and execution/materials (mosaics, dinky handrails etc.).

Re the recent additions- some of the buildings are individually interesting, but in the context of the campus as a whole are just plain wrong imho. I’ve ranted on about this before, so to save time I’ll link to some previous thoughts: https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4459

If you’re really curious, I can lend you my previous dissertation.;)

To clarify rose tinted nostalgia, the science buildings are decrepid. The chemistry building was not exactly extended. A new building was built right up against it.

On an overall view Ucd is a big subject to take on in one go. It has a many issues. Some of these included unfinished buildings (engineering), poor land use ( the bar the restaurant, the bank),inapropriate buildings uses (admin is located in the center of campus ,when it is rarely used by the student body).

Finally and most interestingly given the recent french university riots ucd was designed specifically to stop students congregating. So while there is plenty of space there are no squares or outdoor “leisure” space, that’s convenient. It is quite a tour de force,considering the size of the campus and the number of playing pitches.

Things are improving a little at a time however, the new student center (which naturally is too small too accomodate all student services ) is nice. The seperation of arts and commerce has given a huge lease of life to the whole campus. And vet & nursing have been brought in and the other end, with med and civil to follow within a year. During the day the place is humming. Nighttime is still a problem thought ,the place is as dead as a dodo.

Perhaps it would be better to focus on a specific issue with ucd. Indeed I would consider the imminent inclusion of some arts school from some deprived skanger’s area of the city most worthy of discussion. I say that because if it joins the belfield fold thats all it will be some arts school. Artist chicks are ridiculously hot thought some there are ups and ups.

a boyle- you do your self a dissevice by couching your occasional good points in deliberately inflammatory language and off-the-point waffle. However, I’ll try to respond.

First off, the obvious one (and the most tiresome one). The UCD campus competition was held in 1963-64, the Paris riots were in 1968. All of the salient features that people attribute to ‘riot-proofing’ are nothing of the sort, and were present in some form in the 1964 Wejchert competition entry.
a) The lake is there as a fire-fighting measure and came about because there is/was a stream running through the site that apparently stank to high heaven before the campus was built. By damming it to create the lake the smell was removed.
b) The various flights of steps, which admittedly are slightly awkward to negotiate, are a design feature intented to overcome the undulating nature of the site, not to make mass assembly awkward.
c) The design of the Arts building, with a common ground floor and upper floors that become less interconnected as they rise higher, was intended to give the individual departments a specific identity while allowing for (conceptual) interdiscipliniarity at ground level, where all fields meet and share space. This design feature wasn’t developed so riot police could get the lift to the top floor and drive the unruly students down to the ground floor from above.
d) The underground tunnels also weren’t an anti-riot feature as has been suggested. Ever look above your head in UCD? Ever see an overhead wire? Didn’t think so. All services are underground.
I’m not saying that you suggested all of these, but I’ve heard all of them down through the years at one time or another. What someone’s belief in riot-proofing says to me is that they arrive at UCD with their opinion of it firmly decided beforehand and they are unable to see it for what it is. Concrete jungle, sigh sigh sigh.

The reason UCD has no major outdoor leisure space as you see it (I disagree, just wait a sec and bear with me) is that it was specifically designed to be like an urban street running the length of the pedestrian mall. The mall was to develop over time with buildings along almost its entire length, with just the lake as a relieving feature in the centre. Perhaps you don’t remember, but before the O’Reilly Hall was built (a major sin, imho) there was a large green area on the site constructed using the material excavated from the lake site and designed as a leisure area and sound barrier between the campus and the N11.
But how can you say it has no major leisure space that’s convenient? Aside from the lakeside site, the campus is roughly 300 acres in size- more open space than you can shake a stick at, and no part of the mall is more than 5 minutes from a green field. Want to kick a football? Want to lie on the grass and look at the clouds? Want to smoke a spliff? Want to drink beer? Want to get jiggy with your lady/fella? A quarter of a mile away, no more than that.

You are both right and wrong to say that things are improving. Right, because more academic space has been provided, wrong because the buildings that have been provided are fundamentally at odds with the original campus design. Did you read the stuff I wrote in the other thread I linked to in my post above? Have a look.

I agree that such things as the unfinished Engineering building are a problem (an admin/politics problem, not a design one, though), but the other things you cite?
a) The Admin building was quite deliberately placed in the centre of the campus as a gesture to all college users/members to signify that the college administration wasn’t some faceless, ivory-tower ‘corporation’ but was open and approachable. Sure, you mightn’t use it all that frequently, but I think its location is ideal. (Whether or not the college admin is in fact a faceless, ivory-tower ‘corporation’ is a story for another day.)
b) The restaurant as a poor land use? Do I even need to respond? (And the bar and bank? Jeez, this Terminal Architecture disease…)

You’re right to say that UCD is a big subject to take on in one go. It took me the best part of 9 months of serious study and analysis to reach my conclusions. You?

Lastly, my stance on the Science Building is not ‘rose-tinted nostalgia’. I realise you think that anything that wasn’t built tomorrow should be wiped from the face of the earth save in exceptional circumstances (see your comments from the York Street thread, included below: off topic question- your definition of ‘original things’???), but some of us actually quite like some old buildings. Not all of them, and not all to the same degree, and not as long as they date from a certain period and no later. More recent buildings certainly have a harder time fighting their case. Chesterton put it better than I can: “Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.”
Is it really that hard to understand that someone might like the Science Building? And if it is that hard, is it really that hard to tolerate a difference of opinion? Remember, decrepitude does not equal poor design, just poor maintenance and a lack of tlc.

@a boyle wrote:

@Andrew Duffy wrote:

They aren’t Georgian, they are 1940s replicas. It is possible that some of the doorcases are original.

If it means bringing new life a run down nook of the city then tear away.

The doors are nothing special: they are narrow and very plain. And the photos show that the insides had nothing of interest. We can’t keep everything. Stick to saving original things! Too much nostalgia and we would get nowhere!

EDIT: Cross-post with phil. (Yes, this took me a little time to write.)

@phil wrote:

Do you know what the new building is? I admit that my liking of the Science block is based more on nostalgia than anything else, and that weird knack I have of liking buildings that no-one else seems to. If it is not functioning anymore it should probably go.

I have often heard of that idea about the campus design, but never heard for definite about the influence of the riots on its design. I know that there are definitely services tunnels running from on front of the area where the new Commerce Building is down to the Students Centre that were supposedly an escape route for lecturers 🙂 ! Ctesiphon will probably know about this though. In many ways the location of the Admin building makes sense. All students will definitely have to go there at some stage so situating it in the centre makes most sense. I agree with you about the student bar, but the Restaurant Buiding is probably one of the finest examples of 20th Century architecture in Ireland. I think the engineering block was never finished due to running out of funds or something like that.

I suppose universities will always be somewhat dead at night, apart from the bars etc, but it is definitely one of the obvious draw-backs of its suburban location.

I don’t really get your last point. Not really sure if you are being serious or not

sorry i tried to reply but it killed the message at the crucial moment. I have to work now so maybe i will continue this later

reply to phill and ctesiphon

First off,if i am being insulting then please accept my apologies, it is not my intention.

Indeed you are spot on about all the urban myth stuff, but i would quibble with you on one point. It took some time to build the campus and i would not be surprised if the steps were put in that way to impend students congregating. Whether the intent was there doesn’t really matter, the effect is the same! Ucd is a difficult place to organise groups by default or design.

What i mean by leisure space is “urban park settings”. I think that’s what you would call it. Small/large square where people are drawn to. That is what gives a place atmosphere. There is one: during the summer lots of people(failures!) lie out in front of oreilly , thats the kind of thing i mean. And there are three particular places that could hugely improve the ambience of the place.
1. The very spot where the science lecture theatres are located ought to be demolished and moved to a higher structure bookending the corner between physics and biology. This would allow all three sciences buildings to open onto each other. I think this would be cool.
2. that car park in front of the pretty building beside admin (there’s only one!) Properly redone with the bank moved back. A dramsoc theatre on another side and the pretty building redone as the student/staff bar on different floor. That would bring sense of purpose to the place.
3. the space in front of eng. A new wing of eng or some institution (admin?) sitting on top of the wasteful bus stop and finishing off a third square (this one could be some kind of sports facility.

There is loads of space around the college no doubt.And that is fantastic.I know i am being facetious but i can’t help my self: you don’t develop and sense of community by bumping into strangers at the heated airvents behind the restaurant while sparking up your second blunt! What i mean is that all the space outside the campus core lends itself to specific group/ solitary activity.I am not a english expert and it’s a rather nebulous notion to communicate but i hope you get my drift. You would only see a group of footballers playing , or some people going for a stroll , or stoners stoning. And having that facility is fantastic , but you would never see a few thousand lying out on the pitches, because psychologically they are too “far” away.

As an obsessive archetecture and planning nut i can assure you that the better part of 5 years of thinking went into my thoughts!

I cannot agree with you on the science buildings. In the time i spent there i found them to be of the most poor design, and spirit breaking. And on this one i am afraid that i will win out, as they have not been designed to have a long life! Specific things that bothered me are
1 the split level entrance thing going on that means none of the buildings have any meaningful meeting place. You alway just happen to be outside something in a hallway.
2. the level of natural light is not existent
3. The various shades of wicked lino , and that yello vomit colour in physics.
4.I find the exterior cladding objentionable to put it politely.

Re york street you are unfair. I did like them a lot i thought they were very nive. But as they started to demolish them i could see that they were narrow. The photos posted gave me the stongest of impressions that they were not nice places to live. I cannot ignore the positive regenerative effect on this small but uniformly disadvantaged area. Given this and the fact that the buildings are not original georgian , i was satisfied that the right decision was made. I would have to agree that my language on the york thread did not suggest that i had put so much thought into it.

a couple of further ideas :

It now should be obvious that i think the attempt to create an urban streetscape in what is a rural/suburdan setting to be a nice architectural idea , but just shite in practice(And i emphasive shite). My visits to two other suburban campuses (Berkely and harvard) have only supported my view. Ucd needs to reoganise into a series of open spaces.

A word of warning don’t go to ucd for a while , as you will be shocked as to the number of car parks that have been created!

The reason i say that things are improving bit by bit , is that the development plan seems to point ucd in the right direction, but that is just my opinion.

I look forward to your reply

Some fotos of how the campus redevelopment when finished.. dont know when.. is meant to look. u can see the new realigned fosters avenue on the right

oh ya there are talk of a brand new sudent centre… and a swimming pool next to it… reiterate… talks of a swimming pool.. same talks that have been going on for years probably..

a boyle-
(Have to be brief, I’m afraid.)
Apology accepted.
I’ll see your 5 years and raise you by one more- yup, 6 in total (3 + 1 + [6 year gap] + 2).:)

The steps were intended from the beginning, even if not in their ultimate form (i’ll try to post images of the 1964 design later). I do think that intention matters in this, and your original assertion was about the campus being designed to be riot-proof- not so.

Spaces:
As I said, where the O’Reilly is now was originally intended to be all green for eternity and to be usable green. One of the worst of the sins visited on Wejchert’s plan was the O’R H. (Compare, say, the lawns in Trinity, which are either tennis courts, ‘do not sit’ grass or hard paved- pretty to look at, but unusable.)
Your suggestions, while interesting, derive from a different conception of the campus. The second placed design in the 1964 competition by Americans called Crumlish and Sporleder was designed along these ‘parkland’ lines, like a modern Trinity. While the idea has merit, it wasn’t the one chosen. My chief gripe with recent development is that most work has served to undermine Wejcherts’ original vision, as if subsequent presidents decided they knew better than their predecessors.

“you don’t develop and sense of community by bumping into strangers at the heated airvents behind the restaurant while sparking up your second blunt!”
I did. Seriously. Well maybe not two blunts, but in principle yes. And I’d say it’s more likely that groups will develop bonds if they have activities in common, rather than the passive activity (pardon the lumpy language) of lying on the grass in their hundreds. I started in UCD in 1992, and our Arts Day in January 1993 was the last big college day when outdoor drinking wasn’t banned. Some of the people I met that day became close friends to this day. (Some didn’t, sadly- oh Bridie, where are you now?)

One thing I’d say though is that UCD lacks a good large scale indoor congregation area- the ceiling of the Arts ground floor is too low and the space too diffuse. So I guess we’re partly in agreement here.

Science wasn’t designed as a short-life building- another mistaken rumour. I can’t agrue with you on the natural light thing (but in fairness, natural light and large-scale academic buildings have a patchy history at best), but complaints 3 and 4 are about cosmetics. As I said above, maintenance and TLC is all that’s required. Re congregation- doesn’t the central building have a reasonably good basement area for this?

Part of the reason the urban street idea hasn’t worked so well is that the college authorities didn’t have the courage of their convictions. In my linked bit above, I pointed out that Wejchert was dismissed as co-ordinating consultant architect in 1983 or so- the time after which things started to go wrong. I believe that if they had allowed the campus to mature in a managed way it wouldn’t be the mish-mash it is today. So the ‘shite’ is not the fault of the design, but the fault of egos, politics, penny-pinching and narrow-mindedness. It’s probably too late now to go for the open spaces idea due to the main mall still being there and the cack-handed developments of the last 15 years. And by the looks of iloveCORK2’s images, things are only going to get worse, not better.

Lastly, I’ve spend much of the last three years around Belfield. Well, Richview to be precise, but my daily cycle took me from the Owenstown gate at Foster Avenue right through the heart of the town. So I know exactly what you mean about the carparks. But at this stage I’m past being surprised by the college’s attitute to their campus. Not past caring, mind you, just past being surprised.

So much for being brief.:o )

@iloveCORK2 wrote:

Some fotos of how the campus redevelopment when finished.. dont know when.. is meant to look. u can see the new realigned fosters avenue on the left

Thanks for those pics, ilC2. Well, thanks I think.:( Do you know are they the most up to date?

A few quick observations (from memory, the pics disappear when the ‘Reply’ box is open):
They don’t seem to show that UCD now owns the Phillips site in Clonskeagh. I wonder would this affect the Engineering extension indicated on the plan?
The semi-urban footpath from the N11 to the Library, alongside the lake, doesn’t look to be even half as dense as I seem to remember it from a design I saw a year ago.
The main N11 entrance also doesn’t seem to have been redesigned in the manner I remember from that plan. Pedestrians were supposed to get priority and cars were going to go underground.
There’s a new building currently nearing completion at the Owenstown gate that doesn’t seem to be indicated on this (though the realigned Foster Ave might be throwing my perception off).
Are car parks (finally) going underground?

What bothers me most is that it just seems to be turning UCD into the equivalent of the Sandyford Industrial Estate for third-level education. Open ground? Let’s build on it! Roads Roads Roads!!! I’m aware that the legend says something like ‘potential sites’ for future buildings, but you know the way with these things…

As past experience has shown, there’s only one chance to get this right.

yes the engineering building will not be finished.

ctesiphon you got slightly mixed up i think. The densely developped route goes from N11 to dedalus along the cul de sac road, which is to be closed and pedestrianised. There is a model in the lobby of oreilly, and it is quite a good design .If it moves out of the lobby and swells into real buildings, and would give a bit more structure to whats there.
Not sure exactly what is now proposed for the n11 entrance. but a reorganisation is planned.

No the car parks are not going under ground. The plan is to have a multistorey on the site of the current car park behind oreilly.
This raises an interesting aside. All the current permanent carparks are already ticked off for future buildings.Some of the semi permanent (HA!) ones too.

This plan is a few years old was part of some architects ideas for possible expansion.

I was saying that the campus is edging forward in a positive way because the specific suggestions of late have been largely good. The football stadium is relocating or colocating with the belfield bowl. With the current football stadium (not quite a stadium but no matter) to be demolished and I think that it will then be built on as part of res, joining up the glen and merville. The nurses and med building is filling in dead space. (It is also quite an attractive building too).

The new foster avenue building defines that end of the campus quite nicely , lining up with pink building ( who peddle dashes building pink ? ) .Of course if they fill in the green space that would be negative.

Finaly the triangle building behind eng has been redone and is going to form part of the clinton think tank, which includes belfield house (the one beside the running track) and all the buildings in the courtyard beside it. The area between is in the middle of being landscaped as one space.

Cheers a boyle. I must go in for a look at the model so. And from what you say it wouldseem that ilC2’s images above must be of a previous incarnation.

I too quite like the Nursing building (Dead space? Hardly SLOAP, it was a lawn), but it robbed the campus of one of its most beautiful trees of all, from both a visual and a climbing point of view. Many a sunny afternoon was spend in its boughs, skipping lectures but no less educational for all that.;)

I guess we’re never going to see eye to eye on our respective ‘visions’ for the campus. If it’s any consolation, I’d choose yours over the college admin’s one any day.

Saw a reference to this in today’s IT- the competition for the UCD ‘Gateway’.

News: http://www.ucd.ie/news/oct06/103006_arch_comp.htm

Competition link: http://www.ucd.ie/gatewayproject/index.htm

eh just to clarify, the “realigned foster’s avenue” is the ecological and environmental gift that is the Eastern bypass. This 4 lane urban motorway from the M50 at Sandyford will occupy part of UCD’s lands and will connect with the N11 via a flyover before going underground alongside the Radisson and under Booterstown and Sandymount before linking up with the port tunnel. (well if the PDs get their way we’ll need it…)

as for the substantive issue, I went to Trinity first before UCD so my view is so utterly biased (correct mind you, but biased nonetheless) that to offer anything would be unhelpful. Anything I would have to say would involve words like scratch, from, start, again and the like heh heh

seriously though, the keyword is cohesion. UCD needs to be knitted together like a sweater that’s been mangled by a dog. Also a sense of place and a human scale… the concept of a street sounds good. One good thing about TCD is that most of the buildings front onto the pedestrian space, be it a footpath or a square. There;s very little setback or big steps leading up to them as far as i can remember…

@ctesiphon wrote:

…Competition link: http://www.ucd.ie/gatewayproject/index.htm

What a badly designed website! Webfactory used to be pretty good too…

Oh it’s going to be dire. More mediocre architecture and soulless corners of the campus..
Glad I graduate next year.

Has there been any progress on the UCD Gateway project?