Building Of The Month - June 2015 - CRID, UCD

The Centre for Research into Infectious Diseases (CRID), University College Dublin

The brief called for a hybrid building with two distinct functions: a privately funded research institute for highly specialised, cutting-edge investigations into medical microbiology; and – as an extension to an existing campus facility, the Virus Reference Laboratory – a suite of standard laboratories for routine commercial testing of medical samples from the Dublin area.

This dark and handsome laboratory, peering over the trees along the Stillorgan Road, is one of the finer specimens in the museum of contemporary architecture that is Belfield. “The best buildings in UCD are the leggy ones,” says John Tuomey. “I like the space that good buildings in Belfield generate under their canopies – verandas, porticoes, undercrofts, thresholds. I don’t like buildings that exclude. I like skirts that lift, that gather you in under.”

CRID is black – which passes for colour in Belfield, where the standard palette comprises shades of grey concrete, white stone and blue engineering brick – although its surface can also appear grey, blueish or dark silver, depending on the light.

For reasons of economy, the building was constructed in lightweight dry construction. The understated external cladding pattern treats the tower and its pulled-out drawer of testing laboratories as a single entity. “If we were using stone, we’d mark out the storey heights,” says Tuomey, “but we thought the fibre-cement cladding was more like a wrapping material, where all you should read is the form of the thing wrapped. In the entrance hall, slotted into the valley between offices and studios, we brought the external materials inside and under, to increase the sense that the research labs have been lofted up.

“Sheila and I grew up influenced by the Constructivists,” says Tuomey. “The early perspectives by the Vesnin brothers show stretched skeletal frames and taut surfaces. We thought we’d make a Russian building while we were at it. I relish its surface tautness, with the windows pushed through – blistering through – the skin. Usually windows are set deep and cast shadows within the depth of the wall; here, they’re pushed out.”

To my eyes, there is something slightly gawky and appealing, something almost zoomorphic, about CRID. It’s that leggy quality that Tuomey talks about: it brings to mind nothing so much as a little black water hen, teetering on spindly red legs, dashing from the cover of the trees towards Belfield lake.