[headline tag=’h3′]University College Cork[/headline]

University College Cork

The Centre is the newest School of Architecture in Ireland. Founded in 2006, it is the result of a unique partnership, the first of its kind, in Irish Higher Education between University College Cork (UCC), and Cork Institute of Technology (CIT). This provides access to the long heritage of study in the Humanities and Sciences in the University, and also to CIT’s student-centred education with a career focus, and a history of providing craft workshop opportunities and art, design and music education. CCAE is committed to excellence in design, and consideration of wider cultural and theoretical phenomena.

In addition to providing educational programmes preparing candidates for registration as professional architects, the Centre aims to be at the forefront of developing the ideas that will drive the development of Architecture in the 21st Century, and the role of the profession in society. The Centre has developed good working relationships with local institutions such as the
The National Sculpture Factory, Meitheal Mhara, CIT Crawford College of Art, the CIT School of Music, and also contributes to the annual Cork Culture Night.

The School offers a 4-year Bachelor of Science programme, the BSc(Hons) Arch, and a one year Master of Architecture (M.Arch) degree designed to complete the five years’ training required for academic qualification as an architect in Ireland. In learning and teaching, great emphasis is placed on the development of manual skills in drawing and physical model-making. Many of the design studio programmes are based on an analysis of regional issues requiring a built environment intervention. After the first year, most studios in the Centre also undertake projects based in different European cities based on short study trips. These approaches culminate in the Masters programme, where a specific European city is selected to be the focus for a year in which students address problematic and uncertain questions raised by changes in contemporary society, and provide clues as to how architecture might operate in such an environment.

The Centre also supervises Research degree programmes at Masters level, and at Doctoral level (PhD). Research in CCAE is distributed across three areas:

• Responsive Architecture: This includes responsiveness to the environmental demands and user needs. It involves approaches such as sustainable design and universal design, an involvement with “intelligent buildings” and the new networked technologies to facilitate the physical transformation of the built environment in response to users, the climate and the environment as a whole.
• Architecture and Humanities: The Centre co-hosted an international conference which will result in the publication later this year of “Ordnance: War + Architecture and Space” published by Ashgate Press. There will also be contributions to “The Art and Architecture of Ireland (AAI) Volume IV”,a major work edited by Professor Rolf Loeber, University of Pittsburgh and Professor Hugh Campbell, UCD, to be published by the Royal Irish Academy and Yale University Press.
• Innovative Architectural Design: The Centre has a particular interest in innovation in environments for learning and buildings for education, with doctoral studies and design competition entries.

Contact Details:

UCC

North Wing, Main Quad

Cork, Ireland

Tel: +353 (0) 21 490 1876
www.ucc.ie