Are financial reasons enough to justify moving art colleges from city locations? Mary Leland examines Cork's options and Aidan Dunne looks at plans for the NCAD.
'Paint's a luxury!" exclaims Geoff Steiner-Scott. Coming from the principal of the Crawford College of Art and Design (CCAD), this may seem an unlikely statement, but it refers not so much to the resources available to the 300-plus students at the college but to those missing from its maintenance budget. The inadequacies of that budget lie behind the dilemma now facing the college and its parent body, Cork Institute of Technology (CIT).
It is a wider dilemma than this, however, in that the opportunity to acknowledge the importance of the college in the cultural life of Cork may have come too late, given the looming decision on the future location of the city-centre CCAD. Despite the dismay of its staff and students at the prospect of removal from the city to the suburbs, this controversy has no trace of the public and political uproar provoked by delays to the rebuilding of Cork School of Music. Yet it is an older institution, harnessed in an almost familial allegiance to certain names and places within the city and with at least as far-reaching and important a cultural influence as that proclaimed on behalf of its sister college.
No one who lived in Cork through its year as European Capital of Culture could fail to see the impact of its graduates, resident and returning, on the events of 2005, so it seems ironic that in the immediate aftermath Cork should be willing to exile its college of art.
Is this inevitable? As Michael Delaney, head of development at CIT, explains, surveys of conditions and growth potential there were commissioned and fused into the Kelly Report. The three options listed as solutions to the college's problems were the refurbishment and extension of the existing premises, its removal to a larger premises within the city, or the sale of the building and relocation of the college to a new site on the suburban campus of CIT at Bishopstown, where there is land to spare and a student body numbering about 12,000.
"It would cost a very significant amount of money to bring the existing building up to standard," says Delaney, adding that while the Kelly Report recommends the Bishopstown site, the Department of Education and Science allocation - of an amount as yet unspecified - does not indicate a departmental preference. But an economic logic is working its way through this argument in Cork, where property values have come to dictate the value of almost everything else in life. The Bishopstown solution would mean that the proceeds of the sale of the building (oddly, not listed as a protected structure) could be added to the departmental grant for the provision of a made-to- measure college of art and design.
"All of us want to make the best provision for the future of art and design in Cork," says Delaney. "What we seek as an enhanced environment, irrespective of where it would be, is the opportunity to develop links between the college's great reputation for fine art education with CIT's facilities for multi-media and commercial design. Everyone would be very anxious to grow the more commercial aspects of the college of art, and there would also be the benefits flowing from a much larger student body, better access to central services and the creation of synergies between arts students, IT, multi-media and engineering workshops."
Conservatively estimated at €4 million to €5 million, the cost of refurbishment, even with the possibility of buying extra land, doesn't seem so astronomical as to offer an argument in itself against staying at the present location. Steiner-Scott defends the building as one that is "very, very thoroughly used". A maintenance and administration budget of €190,000 with which to manage 45,000 square feet with one full-time attendant and three half-day cleaners simply won't meet the requirements. Special funding has allowed some improvements but Steiner-Scott speaks with a kind of defiant weariness when he enumerates his requests for additional help: "I make the demands constantly, but I don't get anything."
The institution's strong points indicate a building with atmosphere, vibrantly creative in character and with a highly motivated staff. From workshops to studios, each area speaks of ardent tenant. Girls with multi-coloured hair give way to students garbed in industrial overalls or masked and mysterious in cold outdoor annexes. These are the young people - mixed with a sprinkling of mature students in a college with the lowest drop-out rate of all Cork's third-level institutions - whom one sees in the galleries, cinemas, concert halls and cafes of the city, and who will be lost to it should they be moved to Bishopstown. And the city, enriched by them in the form of Triskel Arts Centre, Wandesford Quay, Backwater Arts, the Artists' Collective and Cork Printmakers, will be lost to them.
For many years the Cork School of Art was administratively encased within the vocational education structure at its headquarters in what is now the Crawford Gallery. When men who have been described as the "opulent citizens" established the Royal Cork Institution in 1807 and amalgamated with the Society for the Promotion of Fine Art, the joint body settled in the old Customs House on Emmet Place. This was extended in a design by Arthur Hill thanks to the generosity of William Horatio Crawford in 1884 and reborn as the Crawford Municipal School of Art. The move to its present home at the former Crawford Technical Institute in Sharman Crawford Street in 1980 ensured the separate development of the Crawford Gallery but was contentious at the time, despite the continued link with the Crawfords of Beamish and Crawford, brewers and philanthropists. (Only the river separates the college from the brewery and in the metal workshop is a stone carved with the name of Sir John Arnott, whose brewery once stood behind it.)
The technical institute was designed for William Horatio's nephew, Sharman Crawford, in 1912 by the same firm, using the Hills' handsome signature style of red brick with a white limestone trim. A series of additions during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in a somewhat less confident use of similar material has done the building no favours. Despite its surface elegance and interior charm, there is an underlying flavour of what might be described as constructive neglect.
"It's as if it has been almost allowed to decline until it's too expensive to restore," says Peter Murray, director of the Crawford Gallery. He has no doubts that the proposed move is a mistake. Echoing the concern of staff at the college that the students need the city's easy access to galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls and the university itself, he regrets the opportunity missed when it was decided to marry the schools of art and music to CIT rather than to UCC; at that time no one could have foreseen the arrival of a degree in art history at UCC or of its Glucksman Gallery.
Murray also wonders about the suggested link between CIT, UCC and a proposed school of architecture which might influence the location of the art college. Michael Delaney admits that discussions with UCC are at a significant stage and that their outcome, with the possibility of a city-centre campus, might have implications for the CCAD, at least, he says, "as part of the big picture".
For there is still that second option, the relocation to a larger city building. "The idea of acquiring one of the neighbouring buildings is so clear as to hardly require discussion," says Murray, mindful of the closing convents and schools nearby. "If the college moves it will become a suburban campus, anonymous, difficult to reach and difficult to leave. The city may not have understood the contribution CCAD has made to Cork. The presence of an art college in the city centre may not have been measured, but it is immeasurable."
