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The CRID Building: The Centre for Research into Infectious Diseases - Robert Payne

This last point is worth considering further. The exterior of the building speaks not only about the material context of the campus in a witty and ambiguous way but also about scale. In addressing the question of how materials make scale, O'Donnell and Tuomey face up to a contemporary problem. As craft trades, such as bricklaying, disappear for reasons of cost, speed and lack of skilled labour, and are replaced by prefabricated systems, architects can no longer rely on the capacity of materials scaled to the human body, such as bricks, which are sized to be held in the human hand, to convey scale without effort. Many of the other buildings on the campus, which are clad in precast concrete panels, made in a factory and assembled on site by machines, exhibit an inhuman scale because the joints between the units of construction are large and are spaced at centres beyond the Leonardian span of the human body. O'Donnell and Tuomey have avoided this problem by using extremely thin and light panels of fibre cement sheet, in a dark colour, with dark fixings and tight joints. The success of this delicate and delightfully ambiguous solution shames its predecessors. Witty inversions continue around the base of the building, below the tree line, where horizontally timber slats echo the horizontally concrete louvres of the library and steel I sections, painted a Constructivist red, replicate the concrete columns seen elsewhere on the campus.

The Constructivist theme continues inside the building and it is here, perhaps, that the confidence exhibited by O'Donnell and Tuomey on the exterior falters a little. A huge metal staircase fills the centre of the building. It stands in a pleasingly light and airy room, which contrasts with the gloomy meanness of most of the other entrance halls on the campus. The stairs is grand but appears over scaled for the rooms it serves. Like the stairs, the internal columns are exposed steel, painted Constructivist red like those outside. In the laboratories, though, the legibility of the structure is somewhat frustrated by plasterboard linings.

Laboratory interiors have a tendency to look like the insides of garden sheds once the users have had their way with them. In the case of the CRID Building, however, confidence returns in the way that the handling of the splendid views from the north-facing laboratories mitigates any such risk. Here one of Dublin's secret treasures, the foreshortened view of the city rising towards the north, is exploited to the full by the floor-to-ceiling glazing. Here the other side of the 18th century dream of the Arcadian landscape, first discovered under the porticos of the Villa Rotonda and replicated by Mies van der Rohe in his Farnsworth House, the view from a pavilion of elegiac nature, is recaptured.

The fact that O'Donnell and Tuomey may soon have the opportunity to partner their CRID Building with another on the Belfield campus is a cause for hope and excitement. Maybe, at long last, University College Dublin, the largest university in the country and the only one with a School of Architecture, will start to realise its potential to become a serious patron of architecture.

Robert Payne is a Director of Cullen Payne Architects and a member of the AAI.