Description

Ratoath College is a school with a consistent colour concept that was built for
approximately 850 pupils from an area of new housing in the community. It is the
first significant public building in an undistinguished new area of commuter
expansion outside Dublin. The external articulation of the interesting
non-orthogonal form clearly defines the entrances, social areas and areas for
private learning. The external spaces around the building respond to the mature
trees on the site, making the building very legible from both the outside and
the inside. The articulation of both the plan and section produces a silhouette
of the building that establishes an appropriate scale contrasting with the
neighbouring landscape of smaller two-storey houses. Indentations or cut-outs
into the brick form are in exposed charcoal block work and the windows are all
timber.

The building provides the stringent Irish Department of Education and Science
recommended room layouts in terms of size and adjacencies but uses the
circulation and social space to resolve geometries and create an inspiring set
of spaces. The main entrance leads directly into the heart of the school which
is the focus of all the circulation. The central area is a south facing volume
looking into the enclosed garden. The taller volumes are an important contrast
with the horizontal organisation of the building and provide vertical and
diagonal visual connections through from space to space.

The architects were keen to encourage the young students to develop a sense of
the materiality and particularly colour. In their own words, they ‘sought to
create an environment which linked the formal teaching rooms by means of a fluid
joyous social/circulation space characterised by a memorable material quality,
colour, culminating in a volume – the heart of the school facing into its garden
and the sun.’ Colour is used deliberately against a background of stained
blockwork for contrast and to help the children orientate themselves and
identify parts of the school. Important locations for colours are the glazed
screens between classroom and corridor and the coloured rooflights.

Materials are often under-valued in new school design; here they are used as
found: exposed blockwork, reinforced concrete piers and soffits, rendered planes
of colour, exposed steel balustrades and benches, precast concrete external
seats, exposed pipework etc. The brickwork is recessed in some areas to give
depth and to filter light into the sports hall and staircases. This school has
cleverly created a better quality and volume of space by using utilitarian
materials placed ingeniously and so keeping the building within the Department
of Education and Science costs limits for secondary school buildings in
Ireland.

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Originally published in: Prue Chiles (ed.), Leo Care, Howard Evans, Anna Holder, Claire Kemp, Building Schools: Key Issues for Contemporary Design, Birkhäuser, 2015.