26
May

Belfield 50 – Celebrating its Architecture at 50

This year’s UCD Festival included a very special panel discussion around campus architecture and the development of UCD at Belfield. The event forms part of a celebration of space and place at UCD, called BELFIELD 50, which is unfolding through 2020 and 2021.

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As Ireland’s first purpose-built coherently modern campus, Belfield fundamentally changed the spatial identity of Irish universities. UCD commissioned the foremost modern architects of the period, national and international to design a ground-breaking educational environment at Belfield, that sought to differentiate itself from the traditional quadrangles of older Irish third-level environments.

This new campus, designed by a young Polish architect Andrzej Wejchert who won UCD’s international architectural competition in 1963, modified a distinguished old suburban landscape – a series of eleven separate demesnes – to create a designed place for learning, sport and university life.