The forces that shaped the Irish Regional Technical College buildings

The paper charts the early development of environmental thinking in Architecture up to the radical paradigm shift of modernism and brutalism. The resulting emphasis on proportional grammar over the technical performance of the interior environment would be common threads in Educational architecture leading up to the design of the Regional Technical Colleges (RTCs) in 1967. Changes in technology, materials and skills shortages led to the development of post war steel frame Hertfordshire Schools which greatly influenced the future direction of Technological School and College design. Financial rationalisation saw a movement away from the steel frame CLASP models to concrete frame Intergrid systems, which would directly influence a key precedent of the RTC design, the M&M building at the University of Birmingham. The intelligence of the building design by ARUP would be compromised by the Modernist emphasis on plastic over glazed facades, which lacked shading suffered from great heat loss. The movement away from quality materiality and exposed grid structure, resulted in a loss of delight and a greater level of brutalism.