The building is located where the fringe of the newly emerging Grangegorman TU Dublin campus meets the industrial landscape of the former Broadstone railway station and Dublin city bus depot.
At first, the project scope was potentially destined to provide a temporary home in modular cabins housing the Printmaking Workshop. During the early stages of our research, our team demonstrated better value for money with a purpose-built, robust and flexible solution offering a multitude of future uses. Notwithstanding the economic benefits, a fit-for-purpose environment would offer significant gains for the end-users, the University campus and a significant social dividend for the local communities.
The Workshop was not to be a presentation or pastiche of an industrial space. Instead, we were searching for a place of specific character, a place for production, a place to be robustly engaged with and altered.
A short delivery programme demanded forms of construction that were commonplace and simple to build. Construction details are limited in number, unsophisticated but purposeful. The saw-tooth roof form is orientated optimally, with fully glazed north lights and south facing sloped roofs hosting a full array of 40 photovoltaic panels on the southernmost bay.
The building is distinguished on the campus by the silhouette of its pitched roofs and its expansive bright white interior. Subtle spatial characters such as the low truss booms, caryatid-like UC columns, moveable walls on castors and a fully glazed studio annex to the south produce nodal points and overlapping room-like divisions within a simple enclosure. The floor-to-ceiling glazed studio annex is set about 50cm higher than the footpath outside. The soffit of this space is flat so that one is drawn to the trees and wide pedestrian walkway outside. In this way, the campus is drawn into the workshop, and this ‘shop window’ also permits the workshop to be projected into the campus
In association with PLUS Architecture.
