Conservation Management Plan: St Brendan's Community School, Birr

The Conservation Management Plan (CMP) for St. Brendan’s Community School, Birr (Co. Offaly) is developed from research conducted by Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB) and John McLaughlin Architects (JMCLA) funded by the Getty Foundation’s ‘Keeping It Modern’ grant, awarded in 2018. The project was led by Professor Gary A. Boyd of QUB and coordinated by Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin of JMCLA.

It was produced in collaboration with a series of stakeholders including the then incumbent principal Ming Loughnane and other members of the school staff, members of the school management board, the Department of Education and Skills, representatives from the student body, and a series of expert consultants.
St Brendan’s Community School, by architects Peter and Mary Doyle is an internationally recognised and unique exemplar of Irish modernism. Designed and built in the 1970s, it is still in use as a school by approximately 1,000 staff and students on a daily basis. Currently the building is suffering from on-going material degradation and thermal and environmental issues.
The aim of this CMP is to provide guidance to the owner on how to manage the significance of the
place while dealing with the issues surrounding
the building’s fabric and environmental performance. It proposes a means to reconcile the school’s ongoing life as an educational facility with its cultural value as an icon of Irish modernist architecture and symbol of an innovative and democratic approach to education in the Irish State.
It is divided into five sections:

Section 1 presents an understanding of the place through analyses of key aspects of the building: its history, present condition, how it is used by its occupants, and its environmental performance including costs and energy usage.
Section 2 provides further interpretative analysis on less immediately tangible and wider aspects of the school and its working and social life presented through a series of maps, diagrams and other new representations.
Sections 3, 4 and 5 draw upon these data sets to present findings and recommendations.
Section 3 contains the ‘Statement of Significance’ (SoS). This highlights which parts of St Brendan’s School are the most important. In turn the SoS
promotes a closer examination of the building’s fabric to determine the ‘tolerance for change’ of each of its elements.
Following from this Section 4 defines the building’s key vulnerabilities and threats and outlines a series of policies designed to address both physical conditions in the building as well as proposing developments in how it might be managed and operated.
Section 5 proposes a series of key strategic interventions into the building’s spaces, fabric and servicing. The pros and cons of each of these are appraised in turn along with an analysis of their potential social, technical and aesthetic value to the school through matrices measuring cost against potential impact. This is followed by suggestions on how, for economic and operational reasons, the phasing of measures and works could be carried out according to short, medium and long term timeframes. It also specifies how certain works may be interdependent and
should be grouped together. Finally, potential opportunity for the development and use of new, alternative energy sources for the school are considered.
The production of the Conservation Management Plan represents an extremely valuable and unusual opportunity to holistically and comprehensively examine and evoke the series of cultural, social, technological and environmental conditions that contribute to the uniqueness of St Brendan’s School.
The principle recommendation of this Conservation Management Plan is simply that the school board and community adopt it. As a central aspect of a strategy to ensure that St Brendan’s remains not only a successful working school, an icon for an enlightened approach to education and an international beacon for twentieth-century Irish modernism, it will also help it to become a paradigm for a sustainable future in education and elsewhere, the challenge of the twenty-first century.