The UCD campus masterplan project, was developed as a discussion on Ulysses by James Joyce. The project stems from the nine muses of Joyce, each representing a college and a building that would have its own character and unique presence on the campus. The identity of a campus today is much more as a brand or a singular image that represents the school in one way. This collegiate style is interesting in that it is a microcosm of architecture in such a deep way. The development of style comes from the idea of developing a brand. The brand is recognizable like Coca Cola but represents a much more utilitarian and overarching group of people. In fact, the style in which a school is developed, certainly drives the alumni donors and the future students selecting the university. So the concept of style brings into question the legitimacy of selecting a specific dated idea or opening the doors to a plethora of individual ideas. For this project, the later was chosen, and though the project was not successfully chosen, it is, to me, the strongest way to develop a campus in a post-anthropocentric society. In which each college, subject, and muse takes on its own character, in-between a singular identity of the university and a distinct/unique object in its own right.
Each of the nine muses represents a subject and a time that relates directly to the novel Ulysses. By developing each individual college into its own identity, we created a university that could develop in almost unlimited ways. Each building and mini campus could be seen as its own self sustaining college where identities of students would be stronger but also the benefits of the old campus still keep the historical fabric of UCD together.
Interestingly enough, when looking for schools, it was always said that you can make a big school small but you cannot make a small school big. This, to me, rings true in the development of a project looking to double the size of a college campus where our solution was to minimize and reduce the school into constituent parts that were inseparable from the whole.
Each of the muses was set on a series of intertwining pathways which we propose be curated with multiple types of landscape. This was the landscape could be set in place way before each stage of construction began so that the creation of the campus was natural and could begin and exist without architecture.