A young Glasgow-based architectural practice has won an international competition to design Wexford County Council's new headquarters on a hilly site with commanding views over the town.
NORD Architecture's design for the €34 million project was chosen unanimously by the competition jury for its clarity of design, organisation, legibility, environmental strategy and landscaping, which includes a terraced "civic garden".
An initial 94 entries were shortlisted to six. These were by Bucholz McEvoy, Denis Byrne, Patrick Harrington, Board Architecture, Mario Cucinella and NORD - all of whom were asked to develop their schemes before NORD was finally chosen as the winner.
The county council is currently housed in the former jail near the town centre and in a number of other locations. Its new headquarters is to be built on a site it owns at Carricklawn, on the western outskirts of Wexford.
Only about six acres of the site will be used for the new building. Another portion is earmarked for a new headquarters for the Department of the Environment, while part of Wexford's proposed "inner relief road" will also run through it.
In its brief for the competition, which was run by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the council stressed design quality, not just in terms of aesthetics but also a quality working environment and overall "sustainability".
Nonetheless, it insisted on a minimum of 375 car parking spaces on the site, to be screened by appropriate landscaping.
The building was also to reflect its "open and responsive" ethos, as well as having a "clear identity" and flexibility for expansion.
NORD Architecture, which won Building Design magazine's Young Architects of the Year award in 2006, says its design would create a "generous urban-scale forecourt" in the form of a terraced civic garden between the street and the entrance.
"Areas of soft landscaping are dedicated to a rich variety of plants indigenous to the Wexford area, while hard surfaces are formed from smooth-cut slabs of stone derived from local sources . . . punctuated by shallow pools of water".
The civic garden would lead to the entrance, with the building carried over it by a long cantilever.
"This is strategically sited so as to be the first thing the public see and are drawn to as they approach [ it]."
Internally, the building is gathered around a public "street" at ground-floor level, with the office space above laid out around a series of landscaped courtyards for natural light and ventilation, and a roof terrace which will have panoramic views. The building is to have an outer screen-printed glazed "skin" to symbolise "a desire towards transparency in political terms" as well as providing a thermal buffer to control solar gain and help to pre-heat air to reduce overall energy consumption.
