FROM THE ARCHIVES:The 20th anniversary of UCD's Belfield campus was marked by Frank McDonald explaining how it came to be designed on a kitchen table in Warsaw. -
JOE JOYCE
ANDRZEJ WEJCHERT designed the layout of UCD’s campus in Belfield on the kitchen table of his mother’s apartment in Warsaw, working from photographs of the site. The Polish architect, who has since made his home here, was 26-years-old at the time. He had never been to Ireland, but he had met some English people in Warsaw who told him we had a fondness for small-scale intimacy, so he designed Belfield in such a way that the main buildings would all be within a five-minute walk, laying great stress on landscaping and the creation of “micro-climates”.
It is a mark of how truly international the 1964 architectural competition for UCD’s commission was that it should have been won by a complete outsider like Wejchert, ahead of two American architects, five Czechs and our own Stephenson and Gibney. There were 105 entries from 24 countries, but what impressed the assessors was that Wejchert had made the best stab at providing for the likelihood that Belfield would be “built in various stages, at unpredictable intervals and by different architects”, as he put it himself last week. He did this quite ingeniously by arranging the buildings on both sides of a covered walkway which runs irregularly through the centre of the campus like a crooked spine.
Belfield is very definitely a campus, quite the opposite of the classically collegiate Trinity College, where even the modern buildings are grouped around Oxbridge-style quadrangles. But as a campus, UCD compares favourably with universities in Britain of the same Sixties vintage. “Conceived in an age of heroic, thundering architectural miscalculations, Belfield must be chalked up as representing a good workable idea, sensitively carried out,” the Architectural Review declared in 1973. “It stands a decent chance of looking better and thus of rising in the unconscious esteem of its users at a time when so many other buildings in the same class, built at the same time, are looking worse.”
For students who had never known Earlsfort Terrace, Belfield must be the very epitome of the “groves of academe”. For those who went through UCD before 1970, it might as well be a foreign country. And for others, like myself, who started in “The Terrace” and had to move out to what was then a raw building site in the suburbs, our view of the place will always be coloured by the trauma of evacuating the city.
Some of us tried to prevent it by occupying the administration wing of the old college in February, 1969, in Ireland’s first serious student revolt, and we made the front page of all the papers, the Irish Independent opening its lead story with the immortal line, “The black flag of anarchy flew over UCD last night”. There were meetings in the Great Hall in what became known as the “Gentle Revolution” but, by then, it was far too late.
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