Printing House Square, Trinity Collge Dublin

Contemporary design containing student residences, sport and well-being facilities in a sensitive new addition to historic Trinity College campus Printing House Square is the first new square to be built in Trinity for 200 years. A new gateway between college and city opens the historic campus to the city along what has been until now an impermeable section of Pearse Street. The courtyard form provides student accommodation, health and disability services, and a sports centre - its stone roof folding down to provide an intimate context around the 18th century Printing House. The building form is like a granite rock with a distinctive undulating stone roof, reflecting the mountains in distant view and, at closer quarters, a grouping of ordinary Georgian roofs. The building’s materiality reflects its form and location with a board-marked concrete working plinth supporting a granite-clad upper world. Glimpses are provided from the courtyard, through landscaped cuts, to facilities at lower levels. The building establishes a strong formal and material relationship between contemporary architecture and historic fabric, blind stone gables folding around the Printing House’s Classical temple architecture to create a rocky landscape setting, allowing it to retain precedence in views on campus from New Square and the Berkeley Library. Households of six to eight students share a kitchen/living/dining space – a total of 250 bedspaces – which float over the Health Centre (consulting rooms, treatment rooms) and Seminar spaces which are shared with Disability Services (consultation/offices/meeting): all these facilities are naturally lit. Sports Centre services include squash, handball and triathlon training, the squash courts being designed as flexible spaces with moveable walls to allow for a variety of uses into the future. Trinity’s policies of inclusivity are focused on creating optimum conditions for students and staff to live, work and learn. This building enshrines these principles, the courtyard form creating a safe space for everyone who enters. All levels are accessible via gentle slopes, ramps and external lifts. As well as physical comfort and dignity, a huge variety of environments create appropriate settings for people of all abilities and needs – from lower convivial households of rooms where younger students meet, live and play together, to the more monastic top floor which folds quiet calm volumetric rooms into roofspaces like Paris garrets with uplifting views through tiny granite courtyards. Wayfinding was developed through the use of colour, with each household given a different colour within a tight range, this inflects to the staircases to provide a sense of identity for every student in every household. Printing House Square intensifies development on this precious city centre site. Intensive use of the site suggested deep basements for indoor sports, cutting away structure to bring light deep into the Health Centre and Disability Services, making the building section like an iceberg. The design incorporates 5 key sustainability strategies: solar panels, CHP, heat pumps, rainwater harvesting and natural ventilation. Energy monitoring displayed on screens in each household encourages reduction of energy usage. The building is BREEAM Excellent.