Printing House Square
Contemporary design containing student residences, sport and well-being facilities in a sensitive new addition to historic Trinity College campus
Printing House Square is the first new square to be built in Trinity for 200 years. McCullough Mulvin Architects were appointed to the project after winning a limited competition. The design creates a new gateway between college and city, opening the historic campus along what has been, until now, an impermeable section of Pearse Street. The courtyard form provides student accommodation, health and disability services, and a sports centre - its stone roof folding down to provide an intimate context around the 18th century Printing House.
The building form is like a granite rock with a distinctive undulating stone roof, reflecting the mountains in distant view and, at closer quarters, a grouping of ordinary Georgian roofs in the city. The building’s materiality reflects its form and location with a board-marked concrete working plinth supporting a granite-clad upper world. Glimpses are provided from the courtyard, through landscaped cuts, to facilities at lower levels.
The building establishes a strong formal and material relationship between contemporary architecture and historic fabric, blind stone gables folding around the Printing House’s Classical temple architecture to create a rocky landscape setting, allowing it to retain precedence in views from New Square and the Berkeley Library.
Households of six to eight students share a kitchen/living/dining space – a total of 250 bedspaces – which float over the Health Centre (consulting rooms, treatment rooms) and Seminar spaces which are shared with Disability Services (consultation/offices/meeting): all these facilities are naturally lit; Sports Centre services include squash, handball and triathlon training, the squash courts being designed as flexible spaces with moveable walls to allow for a variety of uses into the future.
Trinity’s policies of inclusivity are focused on creating optimum conditions for students and staff to live, work and learn. This building enshrines these principles, the courtyard form creating a safe space for everyone who enters. All levels are accessible via gentle slopes, ramps and external lifts. As well as physical comfort and dignity, a huge variety of environments create appropriate settings for people of all abilities and needs – from lower convivial households of rooms where younger students meet, live and play together, to the more monastic top floor which folds quiet calm volumetric rooms into roofspaces like Paris garrets with uplifting views through tiny granite courtyards.
Printing House Square intensifies development on this precious city centre site – the original 1970s structure was rigorously examined for reuse: floor/ceiling heights, locations of cores, basement height limitations and loadings on existing structures made this impossible. Intensive use of the site suggested deep basements for indoor sports, cutting away structure to bring light deep into the Health Centre and Disability Services, making the building section like an iceberg. Orientation reduces overheating potential, diurnal shading by the building form itself and blind south elevations reduce heat gains. Roof planes have PV panels; elevations are designed for economy with standard window sizes, recessed for shading, with opening lights to all habitable rooms.
For the structure, ecocem concrete is used throughout, all building elements are highly insulated and airtight for excellent U values; double glazed units are highly specified for high performance solar control with windows made of aluminium/timber. Services are sustainably designed - basement CHP, rooftop air source heat pumps; percussive taps to reduce water wastage and movement-controlled lighting. Energy monitoring displayed on screens in each household encourages reduction of energy usage; rainwater harvesting irrigates landscaping. Materials were also selected for sustainability: natural stone cladding extends the service life of the building; linoleum floors, exposed concrete where feasible, timber used is from certified sustainable sources. Wayfinding was developed through the use of colour, with each household given a different colour within a tight range, this inflects to the staircases to provide a sense of identity for every student in every household.
The building is BREEAM Excellent.
