ARCT20010

Housing Campus Life – Strategies for Adaptive Reuse and Regenerative Development in UCD

This studio project follows on from the studio of 22/23 with a continued focus on adaptive reuse. The studio is also part of the Curriculum for Climate Action project, now called Building Change.. This is a shared, government-funded initiative across all Ireland's undergraduate architecture programmes, specifically focussed on the revision of studio modules to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to work towards low-carbon and zero carbon designed environments. While this initiative informs the overall direction and outcomes of the studio module, it will also support specific input and exercises.

The studio will focus on developing design scenarios a site at the centre of Belfield campus which provide a combination of accommodation and shared facilities for students and others.
These design scenarios will include the reappropriation of existing buildings as well as new-build elements. Thus, adaptive reuse is central to the semester’s work and theories and practices of reuse will provide the underpinning for the design work. A field trip focussed on processes and examples of reuse will further augment this focus.

In considering both existing and proposed buildings, the emphasis is on understanding them as entities or organisms which exist in time, which have different phases of life from the moment of their completion. Buildings and their surroundings must also be understood in terms of their environmental performance - how light and air and moisture moves through them over the course of the day, the year. Tools and methods for testing and experimenting with environmental performance will play a central role in the studio.

Close attention will be paid to the fabric and construction, including working with other built-environment disciplines. At all stages, questions of climate action and climate adaptation will be central, with full consideration of the embodied and operational carbon of proposals.

Close attention will also be paid to the development of briefs which respond to the changing needs of campus life. Student accommodation will form a major component of this brief, and will bring with it challenges of organisation, layout, circulation and systems of construction, all of which need to be considered in the design process. In conjunction with this, other functions and uses may be added to the project which serve to enrich and expand campus life in truly enabling, inclusive and sustainable ways.