Design Students Recast Belfast

This year, students at the Graduate School of Design will be flying their designs out of the classroom and into the capital of Northern Ireland.

Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Richard Sommer and the students in his studio class “Belfast Recast” have developed proposals to help the city overcome a past fraught with sectarian conflict.

The 12 students’ most controversial proposal is a plan to build a new parliament building in midtown Belfast. The body’s current home, in Stormont, is closely associated with unionist—mainly Protestant—rule, and Sommer and a student said the move would be symbolic of the recent power-sharing alliance formed between Protestants and Catholics on May 8.

“The new building would kind of signal a fresh start,” said Jennifer L. Giarratana, who is taking the class. “We conceptualized the site as kind of the birthplace of their new government.”

Part of the group will travel to Belfast next month to present their findings to their sponsors. In addition to proposing the new parliament building, the class will also suggest that river landscapes be extended to allow more waterfront space to be developed.

“First we recast the image of the city for them, second we propose some very select but provocative changes in the form of the city,” Sommer said.

Sommer said that the focus of the class, sponsored by the Belfast Harbour Commissioners and Titanic Quarter Limited, a waterfront development firm, is to find ways to “recast the image of the city” and “knit the port back to the city center.”

Belfast, which was a booming center of shipbuilding and linen production around the turn of the last century, underwent a three-decade period of violence between Protestants and Catholics called the Troubles that ended in 1998.

“There wasn’t a lot of investment in their city,” Sommer said, referring to that period. “There also was a hesitance on the part of people to use the city in a public way.”

During the first part of Sommer’s studio class, the 12 students analyzed the city from historical, geographical, and architectural perspectives. From Feb. 24 to March 3, the students visited a politically neutral site in the former port area of the city for which they would be developing designs.

“The project in the port is one of the only places to build there now that is not already in one of the communities claimed by one side or the other,” Sommer said. “There’s a lot of optimism about building a new kind of city there.”

In addition, the students met with the class’s sponsors, political parties, local private designers, and professors and students at Northern Ireland’s University of Ulster.

Since then, the students, divided into three teams, examined the relationship between ecology, planning, and architecture in different ways.

Sommer believes that what the students present in Belfast will greatly influence future urban development in the city.

“What we present there is what will have the most impact,” Sommer said. “[It will] allow them to see their city differently through the way we draw and analyze it.”