campus urbanisation in detail
Below The Student Centre’s integration into the existing pedestrian network.
76
The architects interpreted the UCD campus as a complete town in microcosm. Indeed, with a population of over 25,000, the Belfield campus is larger than Mullingar, Athlone, Wexford and Tralee. UCD’s population is an ephemeral one, however, and spread thinly over its 370 acres: an urban condition hostile to UCD’s potential as a thriving place of life and learning.
Opposite top Impression of new covered walkways.
Opposite bottom left Plan views of possible curved and linear configurations.
Fitzgerald Kavanagh and Partners’ Student Centre represents a new point of density in Belfield, reorienting the sprawl around a new epicentre of campus life. Rather than spread the Student Centre’s new spaces over the entire site, they have been stacked into dense academic, sporting or leisure ‘neighbourhoods’. Together these will foster a self-sustaining urban vivacity predicated on
Opposite bottom right Assembly diagram of proposed covered walkways.
openness, interconnectivity and diversity. The Student Centre’s unifying element is its soaring gullwing roof: its long overhangs embrace the 1984 Sport centre and 2001 Student Centre and, symbolically, the wider campus. Aerial walkways within unite the three buildings to create the largest, and only truly universal, public space on campus.