10 minute read
Reaching Out, Drawing In
from RCSI Alumni Magazine 2022
by RCSI
The current phase of RCSI’s campus masterplan will be a lantern on the Green in Dublin. Architect and critic Shane O’Toole describes the new synergy between town and gown.
Today’s university is among the most vital institutions in the knowledge economy, so its integration with the city is of fundamental importance to society. So much so that institutions of higher learning have become the latest driver of architectural innovation worldwide, much as tourism-led cultural buildings, museums and art galleries were during recent decades. Irish architects are at the cutting edge of this global third-level building boom, designing international award-winning campuses for leading universities across Europe, including the Luigi Bocconi private business university in Milan, the Central European University in Budapest and the London School of Economics, where recent developments such as the Saw Swee Hock student centre and the Marshall Building, in particular, have given the LSE a public face to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London and one of its oldest, having been laid out in the 1630s.
Soon the first phase of RCSI’s new medical quarter campus – dubbed Project Connect, but to be known as 118 St Stephen’s Green – due to open in 2025, will create the same dynamic synergy between town and gown in Dublin. St Stephen’s Green, Dublin’s oldest and best-loved square, was created in the 1660s and gifted to the citizens of the city as a ‘green lung’ in 1880 by Sir Arthur Guinness, later Lord Ardilaun. His philanthropy is commemorated by a seated bronze statue in the Green gazing towards RCSI, set on the axis of York Street. Its foundation stone was laid in 1891 by the College’s most illustrious fellow, Sir Charles Cameron, whose pioneering work for population health advocacy is honoured through the RCSI Cameron Award, established last year to mark the centenary of his death.
Cameron embodied both the theory and practice of public health medicine, contributing signicantly to the debate on germs and disease during the Victorian age and even offering guidance on what to do and what to avoid during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. He believed that myriad causes stole people’s health, such as a lack of sanitary provisions, clean water and effective sewerage, and became a leading voice to demolish slums and construct sanitation and water supply systems, helping put an end to the consumption of cholera-bearing water, diseased meat and infected milk that had made Dublin Europe’s most deadly city. He also campaigned for public baths and wash-houses to be built.
Cameron’s public health legacy continues to infuse the vision for RCSI’s medical quarter campus today. Founded in 1784 as the national training body for surgery in Ireland, RCSI has evolved into a world-leading international health sciences university and research institution o ering education and training at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional levels, with faculties of Medicine and Health Sciences, Nursing and Midwifery, Sports and Exercise Medicine, Dentistry and Radiology. The medical quarter will be fronted by a welcoming public outreach facility for civic engagement. The campus foyer will double as a gallery and public engagement space, with a focus on population health education.
Professor Cathal Kelly, RCSI’s Vice Chancellor and CEO, who is a former consultant and endovascular surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, says: “Each university offers something different. We focus on healthcare, with an international emphasis. RCSI’s innovative University of Medicine and Health Sciences and focus on postgraduate surgical training is unique in the world. We established the first Chair in Public Health, as well as the first in Tropical Health and were the first body proscribing for nurses in Ireland. Twenty thousand healthcare leaders who have gone on to practice in 94 countries started their journey here, at St Stephen’s Green. With twelve internationally active research centres and student electives in 22 countries and 45 collaborating institutions, we are proud to be a global leader in transnational university education.
“Our alumni are a key part of RCSI,” he says. “They are our ambassadors and key supporters of our students worldwide. They are also our funders, as we are an independent, not-for-profit university. We are not part of the Irish government-funded system, so we receive no block grants or state funding for capital projects.” The model works: RCSI is ranked in the top 50 universities in the world for ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’ in the Times Higher Education University Impact Rankings 2022.
“We are passionate about growing our city centre campus,” says Professor Kelly. “RCSI had the great foresight to buy the three office blocks of the Ardilaun Centre in the 1980s. They will eventually be redeveloped into a medical quarter extending as far as Cuffe Street.” The first phase, 118 St Stephen’s Green, replaces one of the office blocks, situated between two protected structures, William Henry Lynn’s Unitarian Church, built in the Victorian Gothic style, and a unique pair of Georgian houses designed by the eminent architect Richard Castle around 1750. “We are embarking on a new era,” says Professor Kelly. “This landmark development will create a new front door for RCSI, transform our students’ experience and provide vital infrastructure for our pioneering health sciences research and innovation. We are changing the face of this side of St Stephen’s Green and opening our campus to the people of Dublin who will be welcomed to a new public space aimed at equipping them to live healthier lives.”
RCSI turned to architects Peter McGovern and Maria Mulcahy of Henry J Lyons to plan the new campus. They previously led the design team for RCSI’s multi-award-winning development at 26 York Street five years ago. They also designed the Central Bank in Dublin’s docklands and are currently on site in Tokyo with Ireland House, the new Irish embassy in Japan. McGovern’s other credits include the Criminal Courts of Justice at Phoenix Park and proposed headquarters for both the Law Society and KPMG. “We specialise in turnkey projects for sophisticated end-user clients,” says McGovern. “Because these are highly specialised organisations with unusually complex needs, there are no off-the-shelf solutions and there tends to be a lot of brief development involved. We’ve got to reinvent how we work every time.” For RCSI, this involved a world tour of institutions that took clients and architects to the UK, Paris, Stockholm, Vancouver and North Carolina for benchmarking purposes.
“The thread that holds 26 York Street and 118 St Stephen’s Green together comes down to heightening the student experience by making homely places where they want to linger. RCSI is a small school, where everybody should know everybody, so we have built in all sorts of different opportunities for chance encounters and impromptu collaborations,” says McGovern. “The big difference between the two projects is that No 26 is focused almost entirely on the student cohort, whereas No 118 combines facilities for the entire University – students, faculty and researchers – as well as a public interface, which the University intends to be at the centre of debate and the dissemination of information around the provision of healthcare in Ireland.”
The form of the new building has largely been shaped by its context. Unlike the more formal Georgian squares in the city, St Stephen’s Green has a diverse character, peppered with buildings from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. There is a range of materials and styles present, with the overriding character of the streetscape being one made up of individual buildings rather than a continuous terrace. The west side of the Green has one other unusual feature: the buildings are not orthogonal to the pavement but are staggered in an angular arrangement that may be unique in Dublin.
This is what prompted the building’s striking, bifurcated, five-storey front facade, with its glazed concave base of student facilities surmounted by a projecting two-storey bank of academic suites which combine to form a soaring, contemporary portico with a deep threshold that will draw people into the campus while enhancing the view of the Unitarian Church and its steeple. Operating 24 hours per day, the new facility will be a glowing lantern on the Green, animating what is currently a listless corner of the square.
The accommodation is layered from front to back. Immediately beyond the threshold is a double-height foyer, including a healthcare gallery for temporary, themed exhibitions, which opens onto a 200-seat theatre that can be used for teaching and as a venue for conferences. Beyond the public zone is a ‘Learning Commons’, offering a diverse range of environments for student amenity and breakout spaces that encourage informal learning and teaching through casual interactions among students and staff . The Learning Commons connects the ground floor to a new entrance on Proud’s Lane, allowing easy access back to the York Street campus, and is linked by a spiral staircase to two landscaped south-facing spaces – a new courtyard garden behind 26 York Street and a reinvigorated Ardilaun Court adjoining the Unitarian Church.
The layering of accommodation is repeated on the first floor with a lounge to the front, overlooking the Green, a wide variety of teaching spaces behind and, on two levels, a suite of six large student common rooms at the rear, which are directly connected by a bridge to the Library in 26 York Street. “The students spend long hours in the school,” says McGovern. “Many of them are away from home, so we wanted the Learning Commons to become a social and academic hub for the students, a place where they can build a network of colleagues.” The common rooms all have different layouts and characters. Each will serve about 100 students and provides spaces for group study, individual reading, coaching and mentoring, watching TV and even a small kitchenette. In addition, students will have access to a music room and small art space for relaxation and recreation.
Subtly woven into the design are several small outdoor amenity spaces of a kind not currently available on campus – a lightwell garden on the north side, three small south-facing terraces opposite the Unitarian Church’s rose window and a rooftop terrace overlooking the Green. All of this adds up to a brilliant new innovation in lifelong learning: the vertical campus, a complex interlocking world poured with the skill of architectural magicians into a veritable Tardis of a building on one of the most prominent sites in Dublin. 118 St Stephen’s Green will be a striking building which addresses the landmark aspirations of the University while significantly improving the public realm, providing an active ground floor, curated by RCSI, hosting changing exhibitions, lectures and events. Once again, just as in Sir Charles Cameron’s time, public health is about to play a significant role in the shaping of modern Dublin. ■
