In this episode, host Emmett Scanlon speaks to Valerie Mulvin and Ruth O Herlihy of McCullough Mulvin Architects based in Dublin, Ireland. The pair, together with Niall Mc Cullough and Corán O’Connor, lead the team for the Thapar University Project, in the Punjab, India. The final project, completed in late 2019, is a series of buildings, and a total of almost 1 million square feet of rooms, arranged is a series of red forms, a total distance of 1.5km apart, conceived of as a new social, spatial and material anchor for the teaching and learning community there. Ruth and Valerie talk about how the commission arrived into the office, how they worked, what the core ideas of the project were and what the lasting impact of working on a project like this has on them professionally and personally. Finally they move from Thapar in India to Towns in Ireland, and discuss the recent program for Government, paying particular attention to the future of towns. McCullough Mulvin Architects won a commission in 2015 for the design of extensive new university buildings for Thapar University in Patiala. The university is situated on a 250 acre campus 350km north of Delhi. The university had already commenced a plan of contemporisation for their academic progammes and in travelling the world to make these academic connections, realized that buildings are critical to the life of universities and that the “university as destination” concept is a significant factor in how people make their decisions for an educational trajectory. The commission was described as being for “iconic buildings”. The brief for the project comprised a programme of 1,000,000sqft – an ambitious body of work to be constructed and delivered within a very short timeframe. It included an academic hub, comprising a library, a computer science faculty and a series of lecture theatres ranging in size from 150 person to 500 person. This complex was to be supported by the delivery of student accommodation to house 2500 students as well as other ancillary faculty buildings. McCullough Mulvin worked with Design Plus Architects in Delhi as well as a full design team in India and ARUP consulting engineers in Dublin to design and deliver the buildings which resulted in a significant enhancement of the existing campus. Throughout the course of the project, the architects travelled over to India many times each year – at certain times on a once a month basis, to oversee the design and execution of the project. The living accommodation was completed in August 2017, the Learning Laboratory (the academic hub) in October 2019. Music by Rachel Lavelle. Photography Christian Richters.

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