Education · Ireland
UCD Confucius Institute for Ireland
- Client
- University College Dublin
- Architect
- Robin Lee Architecture, with Arthur Gibney & Partners
- Location
- Belfield, Dublin 4
- Completed
- 2018
- Sector
- Education
- Scope
- Wayfinding strategy and destination schedule · Trilingual sign family, Irish / English / Chinese · Tactile and braille provision · Floor directories with colour-coded plan keys · Manufacture and installation
Irish, English and Chinese on one sign face, with braille, inside a building whose plan is a stack of diminishing squares. The directory carries a colour-coded plan of each floor so a room's name and its location arrive together.
Languages on one face
Storeys
Floor area
First of its kind
The UCD Confucius Institute for Ireland is the first purpose-built Confucius Institute anywhere in the world. Robin Lee Architecture won it through an international competition, and the building that resulted is a ziggurat: three storeys of square floorplates, each smaller than the one beneath, in Jura stone and gold-anodised aluminium. It is a serious piece of architecture, and the signage inside it had to be the same.
Three languages, two of which are not optional
Most people assume the hard part was translation. It wasn't. The hard part was hierarchy, and it starts with the law. UCD is a public body, so under the Official Languages Act the Irish must come first and sit at equal size, prominence, visibility and legibility with the English. That is a statutory instruction about typography, not a preference.
Chinese carries no such duty. It is there because it is the entire reason the building exists. So the sign face has to hold one legally mandated pair and one culturally essential third, and give the third real standing without demoting either of the first two.
Three languages, two of them legally weighted, on a panel a visitor reads in about four seconds.
The resolution is structural rather than decorative. Irish and English stack as a pair on the left, set in the same weight and size so neither leads. Chinese takes the right-hand field at a size that reads as equal in presence rather than equal in measurement, because a character and a Latin word of the same point size do not carry the same visual weight. Braille runs beneath each line. Nothing is abbreviated, because a room called Seomraí Teagaisc in one place and something shorter in another is a different room as far as a reader is concerned.
The sign that tells you where, not just what
A directory that lists rooms tells you a building contains them. It does not tell you where they are. On a stacked plan where each floor is a different size, that gap matters more than usual.
So each floor directory carries a plan of that floor in the corner, drawn as coloured blocks around the central void, and every room on the list carries a colour chip that matches its block on the plan. The name and the location arrive in the same glance. It is the kind of device that costs nothing at design stage and is impossible to retrofit later.
Why it still matters
UCD's Belfield campus runs to 133 acres, and the university says plainly that new students can find it overwhelming. A building that explains itself at the door is doing work the campus would otherwise have to do.
