Ulster University Belfast Campus

The new Ulster University campus is located on the northern edge of Belfast city centre. The project is highly significant on two counts. Firstly, in the university’s bold decision to relocate its Jordanstown campus from a 1970s complex on the city’s outskirts to a new scheme within Belfast’s core, bringing with it people and energy – something the contemporary city centre craves. The other is how the complex, expansive brief has been accommodated on a challenging, irregular site through the architects’ intelligence and skill. The mass of the overall building is carefully tailored to respond to its more domestic neighbours, while stepping up to create city scaled moments at key junctions. Inside, the necessary accommodation is grouped around a series of light-flooded atria.

The campus is statistically significant, with some 15,000 students and staff, 5,000 jobs, 74,000 square metres of development and some 12 years in the making. Beyond the impressive headline facts and figures, however, is a project that is socially, economically, and culturally important both to Belfast itself and to the very idea of ‘city’.

While out-of-town campuses enjoy generous landscapes, their distance from the city can bring with it issues of disconnection from the importance of life outside of university. They also leave students and staff less able to benefit from the energy, opportunities, and diversity the city offers socially, economically, and culturally. Ulster University’s bold move in relocating its campus indicates its recognition of the city as the melting pot of ideas, a place of cultural and commercial exchange. This is significant and bodes well for Belfast, which like many cities has suffered from the exodus of commerce to the online. The move is also hugely consequential from a sustainability perspective in a shift to active travel, public transport, and proximity to accommodation, shopping, and leisure.

The new campus lies on the edge of the historic city, close to the Cathedral and the MAC arts venue. It forms an emphatic northern destination and marker for Belfast. The idea of city as a generator of an architectural plan is evident in the design strategy for the building, which imagines this huge complex as a small city within the city. Where the 1970s architecture of the Jordanstown campus was profligate in terms of land, spreading out horizontally and encouraging the use of cars, the new campus condenses the large brief into vertical extension.

Although the overall building is very large, it has been skilfully tailored in plan, section, and elevation, to break down the mass and respond to the scale of neighbouring buildings and the intricacies of the site boundaries. The organising diagram is concise and direct, arranged around a simple, flexible plan idea that invites a pattern of existing adjacent lanes through the building. Its 12 metre, column-free floor plates alternate with top-lit atria. These not only bring light, air, and amenity into the deep plan, but also create a series of destinations and venues, cafés, study areas, and auditoria, which the University is energetically and imaginatively curating.