Suspended studios, 56 grand pianos and shiny computers everywhere. Four years late, and after public rows and protests, the new Cork School of Music finally opens its doors. Was it worth the wait, the pain, the money? Frank McDonaldevaluates its architectural contribution to the city and Michael Dervanlooks at the teaching and performance facilities

Seán O'Laoire has a way with words. In Murray O'Laoire Architects' winning submission for the Cork School of Music project in 2001, he described Cork as a city of music and cadences - "of light, water and landform, fusing with mellifluous cadences of language and musical accent".

The architects were pitching with Jarvis plc to build a new school on Union Quay and they were determined that the project would be a model of its kind, even providing "a reference point and pilgrimage place for other institutions with similar aspirations" throughout Europe and the wider world.

Despite the vicissitudes of its procurement process, the new school is a splendid addition to Cork's urban fabric. And, as the architects promised six years ago, it "transcends its technical and economical imperatives, towards the making of a beautiful building which is greater than the sum of its parts".

Bright and cheerful, and with teaching facilities that would make any musician's mouth water, it stands on a wedge-shaped site previously occupied by the old school and an adjoining surface car park. Its curved facade mirrors a bend in the River Lee and is clad mainly in Jura limestone, mottled by fossils.

The fenestration on these levels - with stainless steel hoods "doing a bit of a dance across the facade", as site architect Karl Eckermann put it - was designed to evoke the neumatic notation of plain chant. This reference may not be immediately evident, but it is quite enchanting in the evening sun.

Four small plaques depicting musical instruments, carved by Cork sculptor Séamus Murphy, were salvaged from a high level on the front of the 1950s building and re-erected on the red sandstone base beside the canopied entrance, with two more plaques inside. Now, at last, they can be seen close-up.

The sandstone base, redolent of Cork's old warehouses, fronts the school's "black box" theatre that can be used in any configuration.

Above it is the "movement room", with its sprung maple floor and set of semi-translucent windows to provide some screening from the apartment building next door.

Sailing above it is the double-height library, with magnificent views over Cork, flanked by a curving planar-glazed suite of studios, with internal windows set off at an angle. This element of the building was originally intended to have another floor, but it works much better architecturally without it.

A ground-floor cafe, the Off Quay Bistro, opens out onto the pavement, with chairs and tables outside. Its bright, colourful interior features two glass panels of musical notes which were also salvaged from the 1956 building. There's a generous staffroom above, accessed by a white spiral staircase.

The main atrium conveys a sense of new school's triangularity, as does a secondary atrium and separate lightwell deeper inside the building. Thick-planked white oak has been used for the principal staircase, while the corridors are all wider than average to allow for moving the Steinway pianos.

Altogether, the 12,000 sq m building contains 60 studio spaces - each of which is an acoustic "box in a box" - as well as 12 larger classrooms, two raked lecture theatres, a high-tech recording suite and percussion studio and the surprisingly large Curtis auditorium, which can seat up to 400 people.

The building occupies its entire site, so there is no public outdoor space and, more extraordinarily, no car parking. Because of Cork's high water table and the vulnerability of the city centre to flooding, a basement had to be ruled out while the ground-floor was set three metres above sea level.

It was very complex for Sisk to build. Within the main reinforced concrete structure and its infill walls, there are isolated boxes on floating slabs with ceilings suspended from the concrete frame, layers of soundblock insulation, internal windows connected to the floating box and outer ones to the structure.

Acoustics were pre-eminent. Air handling in the sensitive areas is all high volume and low velocity, using perforated panels in the studios and standard blowers in the auditoriums. Acoustic panels in the walls can also be arranged to provide a hard or soft background, depending on the instruments being played.

The Curtis auditorium has hydraulics to allow for flat floor, raised stage or orchestra pit formations. It also has adjustable ceiling panels allowing the height of ceiling to vary from 4 metres to 8 metres as required, as well as adjustable wall panelling to vary and control its acoustic properties.

All of these factors meant that the building wasn't cheap: its overall cost, including the fit-out, works out at €5,000 per square metre. But then, it is a public project for a very special client, and Cork has had few enough of them: City Hall, the College of Commerce and the awful post-modern Garda station on Anglesea Street.

The Cork Institute of Technology School of Music, as we must call it, was procured under a public-private partnership (PPP) deal that will cost the State a lot of money over 25 years. But the onus is on the PPP partner, Hochtief, to ensure that everything works - including the new "fleet" of Steinway grand pianos.

There is little enough difference between the completed building and Murray O'Laoire's original vision of it; if anything, it looks better than the early digital images. That's a tribute not only to Seán O Laoire, but also project director Ralph Bingham, project architect Poppy O'Neill and everyone else who worked on it.

All that's missing is funding to fit out the organ carcass in the Curtis auditorium, a pedestrian bridge to link the new school with the South Mall - as the architects suggested in 2001 - and Howard Holdings to plaster and paint the breeze-block side wall of its very mediocre multi-storey car park right next door. Frank McDonald

Anyone remember the John F Kennedy Memorial Hall? It was announced in a blaze of glory in 1964, a concert venue with two auditoriums to commemorate the assassinated US president. It became a kind of political punch-bag. There were arguments about where it was to be built, with strenuous objection to the idea of siting it in the Phoenix Park. The oil-crisis of the 1970s pushed it so far away from realisation that the altogether more modest conversion that led to the current National Concert Hall was eventually substituted, and the Kennedy connection quietly dropped.

There was a time when the much-hyped new home for the Cork School of Music looked like undergoing an even worse fate. The school was founded in 1878 and from 1956 had the luxury, unusual for the Ireland of the time, of being housed in its own purpose-built home. But as early as the 1970s the building had become inadequate to handle the growth in student numbers. In 1978, the then minister for education, the late John Wilson, announced that an extension was to be built. But the tough times of the 1980s caused the plans to be shelved.

The situation that Geoffrey Spratt inherited when he became director in 1992 involved at one time the use of no less than 17 locations, spread around the city. The school lost the use of a major annexe on Wellington Road due to health and safety concerns, and a replacement sanctuary in the former Vincentian seminary in Sunday's Well had to be abandoned when the property was bought by University College, Cork. A review group chaired by TP Hardiman prepared a report in 1999, and it's that report which has resulted in the new building which students and staff get the run of this month.

Even in the 21st century, the progress of the project was anything but smooth. The building became a guinea pig for the Public Private Partnership process. Murray O'Laoire architects' design for the successful submission by PPP partner, Jarvis, became the subject of planning objections from An Taisce. The PPP process itself came under scrutiny from the European Union. Jarvis, a British company, ran into financial difficulties, and the project ended up in the hands of Germany's largest construction company, Hochtief. With date after date being put back, public campaigns and protests were mounted. But even the highly attractive proposition of the new school becoming an integral part of Cork's term as European Capital of Culture in 2005 was not to be.

The building cost escalated from an initial €12.7 million to €62 million. But the total cost to the State will actually be many times higher.

As the Hochtief website explains, the project company, Cork School of Music Services Ltd, will provide facility management services which "comprise both technical building management such as upkeep, maintenance and energy management, and infrastructural building management such as cleaning of the building and gardening". Over the 25 years before responsibility reverts to the State, the provision of building and services have, in Hochtief's words, "a contract volume of some €210 million".

In human terms, there have already been considerable costs and sacrifices. The old building had to be vacated, as the new school was to be built on the site of the old." As director Geoffrey Spratt explains, "We moved into Moore's Hotel in the summer of 2001. The whole idea had been announced, everything was heading to agreement, they were going to move on-site in September 2001. It was going to be a two-year build, we would have two years of exile in Moore's, and be in the new building in 2003."

The two-year exile may have tripled in duration, but as he showed me around the new building, there is every sign that Spratt is now a happy man. He seems most proud of the new, airy, split-level Fleischmann Library which, on the top floor, has panoramic views over the city. It gives the first hint of how computer-rich the new school is going to be. Everywhere you look there seems to be a shiny white iMac.

The total tally, he says, runs to over 200. There are rooms full of them, one dedicated to music technology (each computer has a music keyboard attached), others for administration.

There are no practice rooms as such. Each of the 46 studios doubles up for teaching and practising. The idea is to keep the studios in use for more than 70 hours a week. It's not hard to see why. Even the smallest of the three studio sizes can make the teaching and certainly the practice rooms of other music schools seem cramped. Each studio is a suspended room within a room, to minimise acoustic leakage. All studios come with their own computer, audio and video facilities, and even a small degree of acoustic adaptability, provided by sliding panels on the whiteboard.

The well-publicised delivery of 56 Steinway model B grand pianos will doubtless be the occasion of envy from other schools, and will surely speed the progress of those students who get to practise regularly on them. And, as part of the design brief, every room has access to natural light from some route or other.

The one exception, for obvious reasons, is the recording studio, which, says Spratt, has already won a seal of approval from the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet. It's not big enough nor acoustically apt for natural-sounding recordings of very large groups, but those can be accommodated in the new 400-seat Curtis Auditorium, where choral and orchestral rehearsals and performances will be held, and which will also provide Cork city with a new music venue.

The hall wasn't completely fitted out when I visited, and its aubergine darkness created a sombreness that was anything but immediately attractive. The atmosphere was very much that of a student facility, more utilitarian than welcoming, though in that respect it's not much different from the auditoriums of many of the arts centres that have sprung up around the country in recent years.

It will be interesting to see how it looks when fully lit for use, and even more interesting to find out how it sounds, especially given that its acoustic has an adjustable reverberation time. With a reasonable stage and orchestra pit, it's likely to attract the attention of smaller-scale touring opera companies. The series of concerts planned over the coming months will put it through its paces for a wide range of musical combinations, beginning with a Carducci Quartet festival over the weekend of September 14th. The Callino String Quartet's Callino and Friends festival will also relocate there from Bantry House next Easter.

Unusually for a new concert space in Ireland - think of the National Concert Hall or The Helix in Dublin, the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, or the University Concert Hall in Limerick - a pipe organ is to be there from the start. The casework of the new Neiland Organ accounted for a lot of the hall's floorspace when I was there.

The school also boasts a 120-seat black box theatre, Stack Theatre (named after actor James Stack), which will be used for performances, and a smaller Doolan Room (named after Bridget Doolan, the school director who instigated the 1970s campaign for an extension) which can also host recitals. In addition, there's a drama suite - a Bachelor's degree in drama is due to start September 2008- as well as the kind of lecture and tutorial rooms needed for classwork. There's a nice touch in the provision of special facilities for the school's youngest students, with furniture built to size, emphasising that, unlike the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dublin, which has been shedding lower-level students, the Cork School of Music wants to serve students of all ages.

Given the riverside location, provision has been made for global warming. "This building is over a metre higher up than the previous building. There are projections for what's going to happen in Cork over the next 50 years, and all that had to be taken account of. It's also a very eco-friendly building, a very energy-efficient building. There was a lot of emphasis on all that."

For the staff, says Spratt, "it will be wonderful to be all together in a single building, rather than scattered all over the city, some of them never meeting each other. It will be great to have studios and classrooms to teach in which are fit for purpose. They really are magnificent, and they've got appropriate acoustical containment, which is important for somebody teaching an instrument or the voice. There are very good facilities in terms of the library, and its support study area for staff.

They have their own open-access administration centre, they have a proper staffroom. They have a restaurant to use." For the 2,400 students it will bring "state of the art facilities, and a united staff where the amazing wealth of staff talent and the extent and experience will be enhanced by rebuilding staff morale. I think the expansion of courses, the interaction between music and drama, the expanding numbers, will create a very healthy environment. The specialist spaces for those interested in every aspect of music and its interaction with technology will be especially strong. And the performance spaces are very versatile."

The adversity of all the delays has had its positive side. "I think it's very special for Cork. What emerged at our time of difficulty was that the people of Cork came out in force with a very united, very strong, very powerful voice, and said, our school of music matters to us. We had public rallies, we had huge petitions, we had sustained campaigns in the media where the people of Cork said, no, our school of music matters, it's not a fringe element to the city, it's not an elitist establishment.

"There's hardly a family that doesn't have a history of its members being part of the school. We do cater for a very large number of students all the time, of very different age level, aspiration and level of attainment. Whether it's giving people a training which they pursue from the age of five through to 17, or whether they're training to be professionals in music or drama, like Fiona Shaw, we can provide everything. To see the people of Cork come out and express themselves so powerfully is a reminder of just what the school means to them. And now we have a great array of things opening out for them, in terms of performances, and welcoming them into the building. That will be a very powerful thank you." Michael Dervan