Lesson Plan
Hugh Campbell

Coming south over the canal that marks the boundary of Dublin city, on the road towards the suburb of Ranelagh, O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects' new school building looms into view. It sits at a bend in the road on a site that slopes up toward a ragged terrace of late Georgian houses. To the north is Mountpleasant Square, a swathe of early 19th-century houses surrounding a densely planted green. To the south is Ranelagh Village, with its long string of rather nondescript shops serving a vast hinterland of Victorian redbrick terraces.
This is a somewhat unlikely setting for such a striking piece of new architecture. Ranelagh lacks grandeur. It has none of the large 19th-century civic buildings that still dominate many of Dublin's other prosperous suburbs. Its scale and character are resolutely domestic. Hence, the impact of the school's street frontage is reinforced; while the materials - brick and stone walls, timber windows - match those of the surrounding houses, the scale is altogether grander.
When first seen from the road, the building presents a group of starkly contrasting solids and voids. It crisply defined, blocky forms are tightly packed, like a Greek hill town in miniature. Closer, too, the building can be read more as an undulating brick surface, split open in places to form pockets lined with timber and glass, and punctuated by large openings, which zig-zag along its length without disrupting an overall sense of solidity.
These openings tell the story of the building by framing and displaying the classroom activities behind. There's a pleasing disjunction in scale between the big, calm, timber windows and shutters and the small animated bodies between them. Similarly, the façade is perfectly poised between austerity and jauntiness.

At the same time, the teaching spaces are not subsumed into a single structure and spatial order - they have room to breathe.
In some of O'Donnell + Tuomey's earlier work there was a tendency to allow each function to condition, or even dictate, the form of its envelope, so that what resulted was a careful assemblage of clearly differentiated, highly specific pieces (such as at Blackwood Golf Centre).
There is evidence in Ranelagh School of what Kevin Kieran, in a meticulous and perceptive essay on the building, call 'the individuation of forms', but there is also a new simplicity and directness in the architecture, which is refreshing. There is a looser fit between form and function.
The building is at its best when it is investigating this tension between the typical and the special, skilfully playing variations on a single theme. Each classroom is different and yet the same - just as each of the 30 papier-mache Halloween masks being manufactured by industrious seven year olds will be unique, but also similar to all others.
But the school also has its special, one-off spaces. The change in level across the site allows a central assembly hall to be dropped below the level of the main corridor, giving it extra height and presence. When the huge timber shutter is slid away from its single large window, you can look down across the hall from the corridor and through to the street beyond. This is a welcome hiatus in an otherwise densely packed plan.

The windows and shutters become active elements that can periodically transform the room's atmosphere.
On the lower floor, the shared outdoor courts offer a further space to be used in different ways by teachers and pupils. Already, the classrooms are being comprehensively colonised. Every surface is occupied by drawings, paintings, collages and mobiles. The rooms are sturdy enough to take this level of activity, but also sophisticated enough to sustain and foster it.

In the design of schools there is a difficult choice to be made between, on the one hand, the creation of a generic, repetitive module that can frame the full range of ages and teaching requirements - as in Aldo van Eyck's orphanage or the Smithsons' Hunstanton School - or, on the other, the turning of each teaching space very precisely to the educational needs of its particular age-group - as Hans Scharoun famously did in his 1951 Darmstadt project.
O'Donnell + Tuomey's approach lies somewhere between these two poles. While all the classrooms are similar in scale and basic organisation, each one has a different relation with outdoor space, which makes its atmosphere and its pattern of use unique. As the children get older, they proceed from class to class along the length of the ground floor and then repeat the process on the first floor, so that in their final year they are at the prow of the building, looking out towards the city, preparing to meet the world. There are obvious echoes here of Scharoun's carefully planned progression from lower to middle to upper schools at Darmstadt, but none of the potentially stifling architecture specificity that resulted.

It is mirrored by the roof terrace above, which again breaks the building at it midpoint and creates a calm oasis - a space that, even in Dublin's climate, feels like it could be used for all kinds of activities over the course of the year.
Externally, the break made by this central element is less happily resolved. While at the rear the loggia serves to unify the whole façade, on the street the column of the central is clearly expressed by the use of a random coursed stone wall (the stone is salvaged from the original school). The momentum generated by this continuously shifting brick, timber and glass surfaces is counteracted by this relatively static, weighty centrepiece.
Then there is the small, stone-clad entrance lobby jutting from the foot of the southern classroom block, which, when the school's name is incised into its stone panels, will undoubtedly feel more like a signboard, but which, at the moment, seems like one element, and one material too many. The more synthetic brick architecture of the classroom blocks could have sustained this whole façade.
Indeed, these simple brick volumes seem to signal the start of a new chapter in O'Donnell + Tuomey's work. This move away from the precisely articulated assemblages of earlier projects and towards more abstract, less overtly expressive compositions is evident also in the house the practice is completing in Navan and in its work for the University College Cork.

There is a matter-of-fact toughness at work here, a willingness to be almost ordinary, almost anonymous. The building picks up on the unfussy handling of wall and opening that characterises the Georgian domestic context. Of course, this ease of expression is only made possible by the evident sureness in the handling of space, light and material.

For a school building, this project is refreshingly undidactic. It is designed I as Walter Benjamin insisted all achitecture is) to be consumed in a state of distraction. It doesn't press its intentions on the children who use it, but gives them the space to learn and play and grow up. Neither does it succumb to sentimentality in its treatment of the children: it respects but does not patronise them.
And all this is clearly visible through those great windows to the main street. Here, children are emphatically to be seen as well as heard. The school becomes an active part of the landscape, bringing to it a new and wholly welcome architectural quality. The spirit of the building is completely infectious. People stop the architects o the street to complement them on it. And rightly so: it is the practice's best work yet.

Hugh Campbell is a lecturer at the school of architecture, University College Dublin

Moving around the side of the building, its organisation becomes clear: a pair of two-storey classroom blocks are backed by a more skeletal spine of circulation and service spaces, which faces onto a protected yard. The yard is surrounded by a wrought-iron railing, a remnant from the original school, whose gate still forms the entrance at the back of the site.
From here - in sharp contrast with the street façade - the school feels open and transparent. The façade's chief organising element is a zinc-clad, lean-to roof, which provides a loggia between the main corridor and the yard (described by the architects as a Hoover that sucks the children into the school).

The school offices, staffroom and toilets nestle under the roof in timber-clad boxes. At either end of the building staircases rise to the upper tier of classrooms and to a central terrace. The overall scale is lower and more welcoming. The building seems deliberately to hunch down to greet the arriving children.
The size, function and finish of each space in the school were very precisely dictated by the Department of Education brief, allowing the architect little room to manoeuvre. But this proscriptiveness actually appears to have worked in the building's favour.
Just as Mackintosh, in his Scotland Street and School of Art buildings, imbued a straightforward organisation with a rich life and detail, so here the architects have arranged the preordained components simply and clearly and then set about developing and enriching them.
Hence the corridors, for instance, are never mere circulation routes, but broad, well-lit places with benches, lines of coathooks and pinboards crammed with notices and splashy paintings. The basic volume of the classrooms is manipulated and elaborated to provide a great variety of spatial experience.