AIA awards Grangegorman Master Plan

2011awards

The Grangegorman Master Plan by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners; and DMOD Architects has been award in the 2012 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design. The Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design recognize distinguished achievements that involve the expanding role of the architect in urban design, city planning, and community development. The awards identify projects and programs that contribute to the quality of the urban environment.

The jury commented: “This project presents an impressively comprehensive approach to site planning, with clear and systematic design strategies. The adaptive reuse of the historic existing buildings appears to be very successful. The sense of transparency both within the new buildings and through the interstitial public space is impressive. The diagrammatic representation of the fundamental design strategies was both clear and compelling.”

The Grangegorman Master Plan represents the largest higher-education campus development ever undertaken in the history of the state of Ireland, creating a vibrant new Urban Quarter for Dublin’s north inner city. It will accommodate 422,300 square meters of academic and residential buildings for the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), along with replacement psychiatric facilities and new primary care facilities for Ireland’s national health care service, the HSE, and new amenities for the local community and the wider surrounding city.

The site is 73 acres which is currently used by the old St. Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital. It has been walled off from the rest of the city of Dublin since the early nineteenth century and is one of the largest undeveloped pieces of land in the city.