Building Of The Month - October 2017 - St. Brendan’s Community School

The Department of Education held an open architectural ideas competition in 1974 and Birr Community School was commissioned two years later from among the premiated concepts. The co-educational, 900-pupil school resulted from the amalgamation of three schools in the town – two denominational secondary schools and the vocational school.

The school is conceived as being analogous to a town. It has no corridors: instead there are zig-zagging ‘streets’ linking sequences of tall ‘public spaces’, with six planted courtyards, strategically placed to end every internal vista and making connections to clusters of lower ‘houses’, or classrooms, at the perimeter. An entrance at one end serves students traveling by bus; the other, nearest the town, those arriving on foot or by bicycle.

The portal frames vary in height and width to accommodate different activities. There are four column heights and nine different bay widths, increasing in 900mm increments from 3.6m to 10.8m, creating a series of rich spatial experiences. It was all assembled using a tractor and a JCB. By the way, the 3.6m grid, which is half the normal dimension, is the same as used by Mies van der Rohe (with whom Peter studied and worked) at the IIT campus in Chicago.

The modified industrial system, recorded in one of the best-known drawings in Irish architecture – a cutaway axonometric showing the construction sequence, from foundation pads to columns to portals to rafters and, finally, the envelope – also allowed the possibility of expansion and contraction according to future needs, what Peter and Mary termed an “ideal” architecture of “no fixed form”.

John Meagher, who was their collaborator on the competition entry, recalls: “I remember Peter saying during the competition, “We can’t do anything here. There’s no budget.” I said, “Just take precast portal frames,” and Peter said, “You’re mad.” I said you could use them at different sizes. I started a plan but he said, “No, you’re mad.” I said, “Just put a corrugated roof on it.” Mary said, “Let me have a go at it.” She made a plan and Peter said, “You’re right.” Mary could plan like nobody else on the planet. She did the competition sketches, in felt pen. She could lash them out. I drew the plans till I was blue in the face.”

“All schools had been linear previously, based on Pat Whelan’s prototype. The competition was run to solve that. Their second school – Firhouse – was the first two-storey school built by the Department. The conversation we were having in the office – the three of us there – we could see the absurdity in the layout of Birr. The footprint was too big, the floor-to-wall ratios. But there were no heating load calculations back then. We were quite convinced that what we were working on was mad. We were multiplying the structure by two. We said, “We’re going two-storey [with Firhouse].” And they did, changing the template for Irish schools a second time.

The Gold Medal citation for Birr Community School reads: “The merits of this building can be attached to numerous and varied architectural criteria: the imaginative transformation of a structural form hitherto associated with utility building types into a sophisticated system of order, the disciplined resolution of many functional and organisational problems called for in a complex brief, the further development of the system for a large building population while at all times avoiding any overt connotation of institution. [The school’s functional] success extends beyond user satisfaction to an expansion of the way of teaching.”