For nearly 200 years, Grangegorman has been Dublin's Bedlam - a name synonymous with the whole idea of locking up "fools and mad", as Dean Swift once called them. Now, following a trawl through all the options, most of the 65-acre site - as big as Trinity College - is to be turned over to higher education. The site extends from North Circular Road almost as far south as North Brunswick Street and from Broadstone to the rear of Prussia Street. At one time, it would have housed 2,000 mentally ill patients. But with numbers down to 200 because of the switch to community care, most of the property is no longer required. Dublin Institute of Technology, which is the largest third-level institution in the State, is set to inherit Grangegorman once the Eastern Health Board and the Department of Education have completed the formalities of "exchanging the family silver", as architect Ronald Tallon, of Scott Tallon Walker, puts it.
STW have drawn up a master plan for the development of Grangegorman to meet the DIT's future accommodation needs. It is, clearly, an exceptional site - perhaps even the last one available on the north side of Dublin, and its future use for third-level education will have a profound impact on the area. At present, DIT is scattered across 23 buildings around the city, extending from Rathmines to Mountjoy Square. Some of its buildings - notably the colleges at Bolton Street, Kevin Street and, more recently, Aungier Street - were purpose-built and Dr Tallon says he "wouldn't dream" of abandoning them. But DIT is bursting at the seams, with no less than 22,000 students - the majority of them full-time - and not a single playing field or tennis court. It also has aspirations to attain university status and could never hope to meet its needs merely by expanding its core colleges; only Aungier Street really has such potential.
What STW has proposed is that the DIT School of Architecture, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, would be among those re-located from Bolton Street to Grangegorman. Bolton Street would then exclusively house engineering, with science concentrated at Kevin Street and business studies at Aungier Street. Thirty acres of the Grangegorman site is zoned as open space; it has plenty of trees and even some sports facilities. It is also located alongside the former Broadstone railway line, which is almost certain to be pressed into service - either for Luas or suburban rail - as part of any plan to relieve traffic congestion in the city. One of the elements of STW's master plan is the creation of a semi-circular plaza in front of the old Broadstone Station, that mid19th century masterpiece by J.S. Mulvany, currently obscured by dross of one sort or another. This would be part of a pedestrian route linking Grangegorman with Bolton Street, via the King's Inns. If this happens, Dr Tallon foresees Henrietta Street - the oldest and arguably the most important Georgian street in Dublin - becoming "a most important area for learned institutes"; indeed, he can even see the RIAI moving there from its southside base in Merrion Square as one of the potential spin-offs from developing Grangegorman.
The main entrance to the campus would be from Constitution Hill, now a bleak thoroughfare fronted by three slabs of Dublin Corporation flats. There is also a natural spine stretching southwards towards Smithfield, which has become a major focus of development activity as the centrepiece of the HARP area rejuvenation plan. Most of the existing buildings are to be retained; they are, in any case, now listed for preservation. These include the Upper House, designed by Francis Johnston in 1810, and what remains of his Lower House, much of which was demolished only 10 years ago; it is to be refurbished and extended for student housing laid out in courtyards. By closing Grangegorman Lower - the road that divides the site into eastern and western portions - STW would create a plaza in front of the main range of the Upper House, with its landmark clock tower and cupola. On the west side, this would be faced by new buildings, including DIT's main library.
Most of the new buildings are laid out along a pedestrian route - a formula not unlike Andrej Wejchert's 1965 master plan for Belfield, which he famously drew on the kitchen table of his mother's flat in Warsaw. The buildings are mainly free-standing, each one catering for a different faculty or use. Dr Tallon rejects any comparison with Belfield. "How could it be like Belfield when it's right in the heart of the city?," he says. Others are not so sure, including some senior corporation planners; their concern is that the master plan, while providing some good links to the city, is not sufficiently "urban" in its layout. But its chief author denies this charge, saying the master plan was primarily intended to show that Grangegorman could accommodate the DIT. "When it comes to the detailed design of individual buildings, it will be done in consultation with the staff. The starting point will be a brief, and we haven't got that yet." Seamus Byrne, the STW partner in charge of the project, insists that the DIT's Grangegorman campus would "interface much better with the city than, say, Trinity College, which is surrounded by railings and walls". But in terms of its layout, it would be "closer to Trinity, in the way buildings relate to the playing fields, than Belfield".
It will not, however, have Trinity's succession of squares. Such quadrangular spaces, oddly enough, do not seem to be favoured by STW. They are not evident in Galway, where the firm provided the main new buildings, or in Maynooth, where the Arts Building was built on a site far removed from the old college. James Horan, head of the School of Architecture in Bolton Street, agrees that Grangegorman would give the DIT much-needed space and facilities. But he says the project is so important that it should be the subject of an international design competition, with a brief which would reflect new thinking about third-level education. "The academic environment is affected by changes in communications, such as networking, world wide web, e-mail and so on", he says. "Maybe we should be thinking along completely different lines and asking ourselves `is there a different way to teach people?' instead of emulating the 1965 campus plan for UCD." Mr Horan speculates that fewer buildings may be required to deliver third-level programmes in the contemporary world. "We're about to start into a new millennium and maybe we don't need to build the traditional type of university buildings", he says. "This could be an opportunity to take DIT down a new path".
BUT Ronnie Tallon is quite dubious about electronic "distance learning" taking over from the conventional idea of a university. "One of the most important things about education is the interaction among students of various disciplines. It would be awful to lose that aspect of it and I don't think we will," he says. "When you're master planning, you're thinking ahead and you have to make certain assumptions about the future - and that includes what might happen around the site," he explains. "Our job was to tell them what to do, and we did. The Government has accepted it, the Eastern Health Board and the Department of Education." As Dublin Corporation sees it, the most important thing about the project is that it breaks out from behind the high walls of the old asylum to create a lively new urban quarter in the city. Whether Scott Tallon Walker's master plan has gone far enough to meet this objective is an issue that will be teased out over time.
