Young architects full of healthy design ideas

College Buildings: A light-filled entrance hall with green glass opens into Tralee Institute of Technology's new Nursing and Healthcare Studies building, carefully designed by a young architectural practice. Emma Cullinan looks at it

Despite being surrounded by acres of green space, the Nursing and Healthcare studies building at the Institute of Technology in Tralee was built on a constricted triangular plot.

To one side is the type of "temporary" accommodation - in this case a canteen comprising a spread of Portakabins - that can last for decades, and on the other are high-level power cables which had to be kept clear of the building.

Yet these weren't the only constraints, the other restriction facing architects Carr Cotter & Naessens Architects, was, as ever, budgetary. In spending terms (and, rankers may argue, academic terms too) an institute of technology often comes between a secondary school and university building.

So the clients were clever to opt for a young architectural practice to design this building.

While it is risky employing a small architectural firm on a building this size, clients know that the right choice of practice will ensure that a great deal of time and care is put into the project.

This job was advertised and architects Carr Cotter Naessens applied.

"We were amazed to get an interview," says Louise Cotter, a Tralee woman who moved to Cork four years ago with her husband David Naessens after working in London for 18 years. "They specified that we were there because they wanted a practice that would devote time to the project. It was to their credit that they trusted us and let us get on with it."

The three partners in Carr Cotter Naessens met on the architecture course at UCD and - as with many a match made in Belfield - two of them became partners in life. Seamus Carr runs the practice's projects in Limerick while Louise Cotter and David Naessens are based in Cork. In their time in London, Louise and David worked for big names such as Rick Mather, Julyan Wickham, and Dixon Jones.

The legacy, if this building is anything to go by, is that they have a mastery of detailing, proportion and scale. They also have an inbuilt catalogue of materials used by contemporary cutting-edge architects.

The green Reglit glass on the front hall announces, from across the campus, a building that is up with architectural trends.

The main part of the brief was for a structure that had plenty of light and created a sense of well-being. As architect Alvar Aalto said, when he designed the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium in 1929, health is a joint effort between physician and architects: this was at a time when light, sun and air were playing a part in the halting of TB.

The result, in Tralee, is a building that sits quietly and, at first glance looks rather ordinary, but which responds well to scrutiny.

Elements sit symmetrically where required - such as the internal lighting, and parts of the building join each other in a pleasing way.

For instance, on the rear wall, to the north, lines break up the large rendered walls, and these lines bend around the corner to exactly meet the top and base of the windows there. Circular downpipes blend with the building and slide gracefully down corners. The front wall has a generous overhang to stop streaking on the façade. All this seems obvious when you know how - something that is learnt in good architectural firms - but too many buildings in Ireland still have white plastic drainpipes plummeting down the centre of the building, and lighting that is shoved into ceilings at random, often fighting with fire sprinklers. Lazy and ugly.

The limited budget has also been spent well with a base of standard materials relieved by luxurious ones. Even at the basic level, materials have been chosen that are no more expensive than the bog- standard elements used everywhere.

So the breezeblocks are made with sandstone rather than the usual limestone aggregate, giving them a warmer colour than the routine grey. The concrete columns were made more beautiful using a French formwork that "works every time" says Louise who learnt the secret of this from the clerk of works on de Blacam and Meagher's CIT building, which Louise praises highly.

Toilet cubicles are separated by metal partitions imported from the US, as Louise has an aversion to laminate in bathrooms. Door are punctuated with portholes - which look very ER - rather than standard rectangular glass panels. And the white ceiling tiles in the lecture rooms are huge. "Normal ceiling tiles are hideous," says Louise, who laments that, "many of these buildings are simply a kit of parts in which everything is just lashed in."

The white render front wall has been broken up with fluted grey limestone sitting at the base of the building and to the sides of windows. "That's all the stone we could afford," says Louise.

Other restricted materials have also been carefully placed, such as the mosaic tiles in the bathroom, running in a strip behind the basins; the punctured wooden ceilings that soften the atmosphere and acoustics in lecture rooms, and the timber in the entrance hall which ranges from chunky columns that sprout out of the ground like trees; and the red oak-lined walls and doors.

This entrance hall is the building's gem, the green light-filled space from which other parts emanate.

Yet even this beacon is serene and no nonsense with its industrial elements, such as those arboreal columns, the girders that support the walls and roof; the aluminium soffit and marble-in-resin floors (cheaper than real stone) which were chosen because they reminded Louise of a 1970s restaurant in Athens.

This building marks the transition of student nursing from hospital-based training to the classroom, complete with a pretend hospital ward in a rooflit space full of dummy patients lying with their mouths agape in pain. The designers of this building have certainly nurtured the building in their care.