INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION - WINNER
In 2011 Robin Lee Architecture completed the €41million 11,500m2 new headquarters building for Wexford County Council in South East Ireland.
The design concept was to create a single enclosure that contained six autonomous buildings for the key council departments. Within this envelope a series of administration and public spaces were a!orded di!erent degrees of environmental and acoustic control. The project was won in an international competition organised by the RIAI in 2006.
The building sits on a sloping site on the outer fringes of Wexford town, in South East Ireland, with fine views to the River Slaney Estuary and the Blackstairs Mountains. It brings together the services and departments of Wexford County Council that, until now, have been housed separately within the centre of the town. Stepped terraces and landscaped gardens ameliorate the sloped site, elevating the building and also creating an entrance landscape and civic setting for the building.
CIVIC LIFE
The building serves and represents the county as it’s administrative headquarters. Consequently we have made a building that is informed by the dense, rich townscape of Wexford town and the distinctively flat, empty, landscape of the River Slaney estuary. The new headquarters gives identity to the collective endeavour of the council as a unified organisation while giving individual expression to the separate departments and their unique activities. The accommodation is laid out as a series of six discrete blocks; each block houses key services and individual departments. The blocks are gathered around a large central space, a ‘civic forum’, which gives access to all of the council facilities.
The central space is informed by the grain and character of Wexford town and is supported by a series of courtyards filled with planting and serene pools of still water. These spaces place social experience at the heart of the building and allow the public realm to pervade the whole building at ground floor creating a generous and legible experience for public usage. Internally floors and walls of the ‘civic forum’ are clad in Irish blue limestone, creating a sculpted interior volume with a calm, refined atmosphere.
Meeting rooms were located to face onto the central concourse allowing the public to have defined, framed views of dynamic workplace activities taking place inside the blocks. The concourse is conceived as a social and meeting place using the notion of the ‘street’ as a typological cue in developing the atmosphere, materiality and scale of the space. It is populated with large leather benches for waiting and informal meetings between sta! and between sta! and the public. Overall the concourse has a calm refined atmosphere but one activated by the arrangement of meeting places carefully arranged within and around the space. The choreography of this balance between stillness and activity, silence and conversation informed all decisions in the design of the concourse space.
FULL EMPTINESS
At the new Wexford County Council Headquarters, there is no monumental stair, no ceremonial dais. There is no great timber door with brass furniture, no singular progression to a great council chamber at the building’s heart. Many of the great civic centres of the 20th century rely on a meaningful transformation of an existing, noble architecture that is remote in time, place or imagination. Kahn at the Dacca National Assembly and Le Corbusier at Chandigarh both achieve their intriguing monumentality by fusing Eastern and Western references with emblems of their own personal cosmologies. Abstracted classical references have been frequently deployed to incorporate, as in the case of de la Sota’s Gobierno Civil at Tarragona, weight and gravitas and at Kenyon’s Newcastle Civic Centre a lighter and more joyful democracy. Each of these buildings is laced with honorific incident controlling the hierarchy of access and event. Accessibility is delicately moderated in the ceremonial articulation of element and detail.
The building at Wexford achieves its strength in the opposite way. Entirely wrapped in a taut glazed environmental flue, it assumes a singular form that can appear both monolithic and diaphanous, of both ground and sky in its wide landscape at the edge of town. A glass panel in the building’s flank slides above a continuous limestone floor giving fluid access to a central void, three storeys high and longer than broad, that seems ine!ably familiar. Clarity dawns as you move through; this is a street, like so many in Wexford, where buildings are staggered on either side of a place of exchange, where the space is loose and open-ended with a vista, where the views of the sky are framed, where the claim to territory is staked by a change of material, or the shift in scale at an entrance. The street is a vehicle of democracy; it is shaped by six departmental ‘houses’ of equal size and importance, each with its own court, each small enough to be humanely lit and ventilated, each with its returning internal stair, oak-lined and intimate. The council chamber is contained in one of these houses. A well furnished room with a good acoustic, it makes few claims to primacy in the hierarchy of the building apart from a view over the landscape it governs.
Tra"c between these ‘houses’ and communal areas (the restaurant, the car park, the roof garden) enlivens the street and the two public stair towers, contributing to their very particular atmosphere. The fine materials and elements of the street are seamlessly jointed to form a single, wrapping surface. Windows and doors are pushed flush to the line of the street wall and notional plinths for desks are let into the stone floor, the material changing but the plane continuous. This imbues the place with tautness, lends the void a strongly figural character and heightens the action of the body in space. There seems to be a corresponding e!ect on the consciousness of the occupiers, employees and clients alike whose actions on the day I visited seemed thrown gently into relief against the relative muteness of the architecture. The scale of the stone module, the cantilevered rooms and the exposed concrete ceiling register in the pace of the occupants’ movements while the acoustic ensures a civic tone in conversation.
Thus, there is a double transformation at play. The first is the reimagining of the vernacular street in the architectural language of Modernism. This is then retransformed through the compression of detail to make an architecture of surface rather than articulation. The space is fluid not hierarchical, pluralistic not honorific, and the action of the individual defined by a sense of civic decorum rather than architectural prodding. Pugin exhorted architects to develop the nobility of their buildings by thinking of them as ruins. One can easily imagine that, many years hence and after a final transformation, the six stone houses of the Wexford County Council Headquarters, services and glazing e!aced by time, will continue to civilize their hillside site above the River Slaney.
PUBLIC SERVICE
Public Service: In choosing design over big names, with Robin Lee Architecture Wexford has secured an original civic hub by a major new talent, writes Stephen Best. In 1549, the Council of One Hundred in Vicenza took a risk. They held a design competition and appointed a relative unknown, Andrea Palladio, to rebuild the collapsing town hall. At its best, this is what the architectural competition system can produce: original works emerging from a design method developed from first principles, rather than an assembly of previous successes.
The most recent addition to this stable, and perhaps the last we will see for a generation in Ireland, is the Robin Lee-designed Wexford County Council o"ces, a new 11,500m2, £36 million building perched above Wexford Town overlooking the magnificent river Slaney estuary. Like other enlightened county councils, such as Kildare, Wexford eschewed the ‘safe pair of hands’ approach to procuring public architecture. It looked beyond the typically dull buildings produced by narrow finance-dominated prequalification questionnaires, and instead prioritised design. According to client representative Matt O’Connor, this decision was inspired, in part, by the success of Keith Williams’ Opera House, carefully stitched into Wexford’s town centre.
In 2006, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland ran an open design competition for Wexford County Council. The relative unknown chosen was the fastidious Lee and his then firm NORD LLP, a young Glasgow-based practice. Its design was chosen from a shortlist of six, culled from almost 100 international entries. Set on high ground a mile out of town, the new building forms part of a public-service campus for 3,000 people, which includes the regional hospital and recently built Department of the Environment. The approach route is at first unpromising; a wide, soulless, tra"c-engineered entrance road is squeezed unceremoniously between a stained concrete retaining wall and the hospital’s drab mêlée of mono-pitches. But then unexpectedly, the road drops away to reveal the most magical view.
A modernist pavilion sitting on a limestone plinth atop four broad terraces, the building’s prospect could almost define the picturesque. Its panoramic view stretches from the broad estuary, rimmed with a necklace of dark green woodland, past a stage-set of gently rolling hills, before terminating on the distant horizon, broken by the purplish silhouette of Mount Leinster and the Wicklow hills beyond. It makes a truly breathtaking setting, in which the building commands the landscape and urbanises the suburban context. In a council headquarters civic building like this, the problem of the dichotomy between public and private is handled simply and clearly. The building comprises six brightly lit open-plan departmental blocks, pushed to the perimeter of a large public room and separated by four external courtyards. Its low horizontal form, expressed as blocky massing behind which lurks a ghostly assemblage of heavy geometric shapes, rises in parts from a two-storey datum to five stories at the entrance.
You could argue the building’s suburban setting and modernist glass cloak is more closely associated with the contemporary business park o"ce. Yet there are clear di!erences which suggest a timeless quality. It doesn’t aspire to flash populist moves by leaning or bending to the will of a computer logarithm, it isn’t brightly coloured in the latest stripes or zigzags – and that is its strength. Instead it celebrates the familiar, asserts calm, simple control and repays attention; this is not a one-liner. Wrapping the perimeter completely is an insulating double-skin facade, a glass membrane which extends a metre above the parapet to greet the sky like a delicate crystalline crown. This diaphanous veil also dissolves in sunlight, as if by magic, to reveal in sharp focus six stone monoliths – the individual departments – only to disappear again behind a mask of cloudy reflections; a subtle play of light and shade, form and illusion.
The entrance in the north-east corner, beneath a hovering three-storey stone cube, is minimal. Narrow framed glass doors, supported on umber anodised frames, make the finest of thresholds. Inside, a double-height lobby leads to the cavernous, 85-metre long, 6.3-metre high foyer, the building’s ‘civic forum’. O!set around this gently shifting spine are eight two-storey free-standing objects. Self-contained buildings in their own right,they each house one of the six departments and two public staircases. Lee likens the scale and proportion of this massive hall to a tacit memory of Wexford’s Main Street, or the rhythm and texture of a classical Roman forum. Yet, in a move that is counterintuitive to both these noble tropes, the roof is clamped shut. Instead of opening to the sky, a heavy concrete slab darkens and compresses the space. This is a masterly move, which endows the building with a strong sense of place, an e!ect that transcends the ubiquitous shopping-mall atrium motif and heightens the civic nature of the building.
Cast into the roof on its south side is a pair of narrow rooflights, which illuminate the main reception desk. These, in collaboration with bright laneways between each building, conspire to create a poetic play of light and shade. A constantly changing sculptural vision that unconsciously draws your eye from inside to out, past the departmental reception desks to the carefully framed Slaney beyond, it reveals a fascination with the local. The materials palette is small, toned down and high quality; Lee admits this is partly a result of the timely tender, in 2007. The floor and external walls of each ‘building’ are clothed in a musty Blue Kilkenny limestone surface, an exquisite stone lining which acts as a kind of minimal panelling system that reduces the impersonality and sheer size of the space.
Elsewhere, the so"t is pale-grey exposed concrete; the seating, designed by the architect, is soft black leather; and the six low intimate reception areas, cleft into the corner of each block, are made of warm oak planks, as are the two public stairs. The timber is inset with full-height glass windows held in polished stainless steel frames, in the spirit of Mies van der Rohe; close attention to detail is asserted throughout. The executive architect, Arthur Gibney and Partners, must also be commended here. Way-finding for the typically disorientated public almost becomes superfluous in this building. Materiality does much of the work. In the main foyer a hard stone mantle around each block denotes privacy, while the luscious warm oak staircases are naturally inviting.
Simple, clear architecture at this level is a rarity, particularly among young architects. Who, when confronted with their first major commission, isn’t tempted to throw every idea they ever had at it? But not in this case: Lee appears to have side-stepped many of the pitfalls. He shows unusual maturity in his use of materials, restrained palette and monolithic form, suggesting comparisons with the New Art Gallery Walsall by Caruso St John Architects, another breakthrough project. As well as the rich palette, meticulous detailing and luxurious craftsmanship abound. There is none of the usual compromises or clumsy forgotten junctions. The building is sumptuously plain and enormously tactile; every joint meets perfectly or is separated by the finest shadow detail with distant echoes of Dom Hans van der Laan’s austere, yet beautiful 20th-century convent at Vaals in the Netherlands. It is an essay in controlled, no surprises architecture where nothing is left to chance, and its spatial dynamics are not enslaved by the detail.
As with any architectural project, there are imperfections. In this case it’s the urban design. The council o"ces and adjacent Department of the Environment, despite the greenfield setting, appear incoherent; neither is located or has a landscape design which suggests cognition of the other. Each is self-contained, an independent island that demands, bizarrely, two parallel entrance roads at the front door. There is a missed opportunity where four lanes of tarmac, separated by a narrow planted sliver, remove any sense of shared public space or commonality at the heart of the campus.
Critics of the competition system often argue that it indulges architects who play their own game by engaging in convoluted narratives or pretentious imagery. This building does neither. Its strengths lie elsewhere, in its sense of familiarity that invites people in, and its ability to mediate the spectrum between universal Modernism and the particularities of place. Like Vicenza town hall, this is a civic building that is disciplined yet beautiful. Packed of poesis and reason without reducing the work to meaningless repetition or diminution, the Wexford County Council o"ces is a building full of rigour and vitality. Lee is a craftsman architect with the eye of a jeweller. Let’s hope that, in this world of belt-tightening, it is not forgotten that the system of open design competitions has the potential to uncover extraordinary architectural talent.
NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
An outer layer of glass wraps around the blocks and acts as the outer skin of a double façade. This provides protection on the exposed site but also regulates the interior temperature through the control of air around the building; cooling the building in the summer and creating an insulating layer during the winter. The glass façade is treated uniformly with structurally bonded low iron glass on anodized aluminium mullions to create a sheer envelope that gives the building a single, coherent identity and scale appropriate to its civic status.
This approach allows the interior spaces to find appropriate form, varied character and atmosphere while the outer form deals independently with scale and identity. The form and orientation is designed to optimise energy efficiency, with a double façade tempering incoming air. The cavity acts as both a bu!er space and thermal wrapper. The glass panels in the outer layer will filter unwanted solar energy, while the double-glazed windows in the inner wall operate horizontally, to maximise air infiltration and exfiltration. The central street area requires minimal heat in winter; for fabric protection only and to prevent condensation. Heavyweight concrete so"ts throughout and glazed walls provide a stable internal environment.
WORKPLACE
Managing and e!ecting the transition from cellular working environments to open plan workspaces was one of the key consultation objectives early in the design phase since there were sta! who had working for over 20 years in cellular o"ces or small work clusters that were to be relocated to open plan o"ces. One conclusion from this consultation was that large, expansive and open floor-plates were a concern to many sta!. We developed an organizational strategy whereby the 350 sta! were accommodated in six distinct blocks with each block arranged over two to three storey’s. This generated the architectural language of six individual ‘buildings’ organized around a central social concourse. Each floor-plate therefore was designed to accommodate on average 25 people, which constituted a small community of people. In this way the small communities developed their own identity within the building fostering a supportive working culture and good teamwork relations. The blocks were designed with a central atrium allowing daylight and air to penetrate deep into the plan to guarantee naturally lit and ventilated workplaces. The atriums provided links between the working floor-plates with centrally located meeting areas at the base of these atriums. Windows in the blocks allow for visual connections promoting a strong sense of collective endeavour amongst sta!. Given the size of the o"ce population the sta! canteen was highlighted as a key social and gathering place. The design was informed by a monastery refectory with generous communal tables suitable for groups of people to discuss and debate. This space has been adopted by sta! as a place where informal meetings are arranged and it successfully functions as a lively forum for debate and discussion. According to some reports, this is where discussion is most open and the real decisions within the organization are made.
CIVIC ADMINISTRATION
Occupying a prime location in an elevated position within the building is a formal debating chamber; the heart of the local government and administration. Weekly meetings take place here around a democratic circular table. The space is technically sophisticated; fully fitted out with retractable projection screens, retractable digital projectors, scene setting lighting controls, motorized blinds, LCD screens, wireless sound system and touch screen monitors for committee voting. We carefully managed the integration of all the technical equipments in order that it did not impact in the minimal architectural design. Draw wires and conduits were installed to enable re-cabling to ensure future-proofing measures were incorporated.
The debating chamber and canteen have a carefully developed acoustic strategy due to the number of people using the spaces and their designation as places for debate and discussion. The design intention was to create warm and welcoming yet minimal spaces that would act as refined backdrops to the activities. The key to achieving this was creating environments with good acoustic properties for speech while minimizing the impact of the acoustic design solution on the architectural design. Bespoke absorbent wall panels were therefore designed with our acoustic consultants at Buro Happold. Bespoke perforated plasterboard was used across the ceilings.
