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.