Winning idea turns Central Bank into school
Architects’ firm wins ideas contest on uses for Dame Street building when bankers move out.
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Aerial view
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Pictures from http://www.gkmp.ie/projects/OpenCitySchool.html
This is gonna be one of the biggest School buildings in Ireland and maybe in Europe.
Architects’ firm wins ideas contest on uses for Dame Street building when bankers move out.
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The Central Bank in Dame Street, Dublin, would be turned into a high-rise secondary school by the winning entry in an ideas competition to find “innovative and exciting” ways to recast the building after its current occupants relocate to North Wall Quay in a few years. Designed by GKMP Architects, it would have classrooms on each floor and a library on top. “It’s very clever”, said Carole Pollard, of DoCoMoMo Ireland, which organised the competition. “If we really want to get people living in the inner city, we need more schools.” As the jury’s citation said, “turning over one of the city’s largest and most centrally located buildings over to Irish youth is a radically empowering and optimistic gesture . . . without eroding the structural integrity of Sam Stephenson’s original design.” From The Irish Times |
Pictures from http://www.gkmp.ie/projects/OpenCitySchool.html
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The current youth of Ireland are going to school behind fences. New schools are built on green-field sites as secured precincts, separated from city life. The Central Bank site offers an opportunity to make a new kind of school, a secondary school for an open urban society. It can become a clear symbol that education offers the means of recovery from our economic crisis, transforming an institution that has failed us all into the means for our collective restitution. This is not a conservation project. Instead it adapts a pragmatic attitude and uses the structure and materials of the existing building to make a new school. The existing steps and entrance are removed and large voids are cut in the urban floor to open up the basement below. A new roof spans across the site, forming a light-filled cover to the main public spaces of the school, with a generous entrance at street level. These spaces invite the city in and offer facilities that can be shared by all the citizens. The classrooms and teaching spaces are accommodated in the upper levels of the existing building. The envelope is altered on these floors to make gardens and voids, creating spaces that feel connected to the life of the city below. This project was awarded first prize in DoCoMoMo's Central Bank Ideas Competition and is currently being exhibited as part of the competition exhibition in the Irish Architectural Archives on Merrion Square, Dublin. The exhibition runs until the 26th April 2013. From gkmp architects |