The development of Coppinger Court, a high density apartment complex on Popes Quay, Cork City, has been broadly received with a warm response, picking up awards in 2004 including the RIAI Best Sustainable Building award. Polly Magee of Magee Creedon Architects, the firm behind the development’s design, sheds light on the project’s sustainability credentials.
What - no grass roofs? No solar panels? No reed beds?
Yet Coppinger Court was awarded Best Sustainable Building 2004 by the R.I.A.I. in association with the Department of the Environment and described by them as a development which “embodies an aspiration to urban sustainability”. This mixed use, infill scheme on Popes Quay in Cork City, is so embedded in the grain and understated in it’s expression you may have difficulty finding it unless you abandon your car, take to your feet and ask for directions.
But what is Urban Sustainability?
Sustainability is a catch phrase that is most often used in terms of the development of green-field or suburban sites, but often the fundamental question of whether it is necessary to build on such sites at all is completely overlooked. Our general philosophy is more holistic and tends to focus on tapping the potential of our existing urban resources. This is what we try to achieve in our design:
- Recreate attractive living spaces in our towns and cities.
- Redevelop a sense of urban community and pride of place.
- Provide appropriately high density of accommodation in urban redevelopment to maximize use of existing resources, services and infrastructure.
- Redress the balance from sprawling suburbia, which is wasteful of resources and increases road traffic.
- Promote refurbishment/reuse of existing building stock in a sympathetic yet imaginative and progressive way.
- Design each unit to maximize use of our most important natural resource - sunlight.
- Create a mix of homes that are comfortable in the long term for a broad range of users, including older people and children.
- Recapture the vibrancy and richness of “close living” in pre-20 th century urban centres, but with all the advantages of modern servicing.
- Make public and semi-public spaces that are pedestrian friendly and human in scale.
- Promote the city as a living organism with continuing dialogue between old and new.
Urban sustainability is a common theme throughout our work and has been the key to the success of Coppinger Court.
Brief
The brief was an apparently straightforward commercial brief. Our clients were two adjacent landowners with businesses on the quay, who decided to undertake a partnership venture when the site was designated under the Shandon Integrated Area Plan in 1999. This introduced incentives for residential and existing commercial and industrial businesses, and also favoured refurbishment of the quayfront buildings. We were asked to maximize the potential of the site under this scheme with good design as an essential prerequisite.
Context
The site is nestled at the foot of the historic Shandon area on the northern bank of the River Lee, which is characterized by a dense maze of narrow streets and stepped lanes crisscrossing the hill, and is dominated by the distinctive spires of Shandon. It is enriched with a warm sense of community, which is epitomized in the description by the artist, Maud Cotter of “stepped streets, whose windows are dressed with richly detailed nets and more often than not, present an object or potted plant to the public realm.” Unfortunately this sense of community has become eroded along the river edge of Shandon by the recent incursion of a series of self-contained, car-centred apartment complexes. This approach is all too familiar in our cities over the last decade. However we eschewed this typology in favour of reconnecting with the sense of place, knitting into the grain of the existing fabric and humanizing the public spaces we created.
Site
The site as we found it was a south-facing, brown-field area of 0.74 acres with five existing three/four storey buildings on the quayfront giving a sense of the traditional grain and scale. A series of stepped terraces with various outbuildings climbed the hill behind. Two old laneways entered the site from the quay, one linking to Shandon Street, and the other ending in a cul de sac. Scraps of remaining fabric gave clues to the former inhabitation of these laneways, calling to be brought back to life.
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