Client:
Trinity College Dublin
Location:
Ireland
Completion:
2023
The Martin Naughton E3 Learning Foundry is a multi-disciplinary teaching and learning building for Trinity College's historic city-centre campus. E3 stands for ‘Engineering, Environment and Emerging technologies’ and its cross-departmental courses will focus on subjects such as smart cities, wellbeing, data analysis and sustainable resources.
The building is composed as three elements: a stone-clad laboratory block (The Nucleus) that nestles into the courtyard of the neighbouring zoology building; an aluminium and glass clad teaching block (The Wing) that follows the geometry of the city, and an elevated, transparent element (The Lantern) which brings light into a central atrium.
Each of the elements responds to the different learning space requirements. The Nucleus houses long-spanning, heavily serviced labs, The Wing is made up of smaller-scale flexible learning spaces.
With a focus on collaborative and project work, the Learning Foundry will be a launchpad for a new kind of education experience.
The E3 Institute will provide 1,600 new STEM places for students, addressing a skills shortage in the Irish economy and constitutes a 50% increase of STEM places over ten years.
The building design responds intelligently to the different learning spaces using a combination of new and established technologies. These systems work together across the building to create a building that is designed to meet nearly zero-energy building (NZEB) requirements and to achieve BREEAM Excellent certification.
Read Models of Sustainability, explaining how we created a model to communicate the sustainability strategy for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019.
Social interactions spark conversations and ideas.
The building is a new kind of education facility. It is focussed on challenge-driven education, on small group teaching, and on independent learning.
It is designed to encourage students and staff to meet, talk and work together informally in a variety of settings.
Flexibility is integral to the design. Innovative teaching and learning environments can be adapted for structured and self-directed learning, in a range of group sizes. The classrooms are all designed to be easily reconfigurable and IT and AV infrastructure allows for broadcasting across rooms.
Support Architect:
Coady Architects
Structural Engineer:
Arup
Planning Consultants:
MDB
Acoustic Engineer:
Allegro Acoustics
