The School of Engineering in Athlone Institute of Technology is the flagship building on the AIT campus. A state of the art response to a contemporary brief, the building incorporates facilities for six departments within an innovative environmentally responsive envelope achieved through the exploitation of orientation and materials. The programme for the building includes classrooms, lecture theatre, offices, social space and ancillary functions appropriate to a modern School of Engineering. The building is designed in such a way as to facilitate future flexibility as technologies change and disciplines align with the latest in research and development.

The project forms mats of open and closed space, combined to form six bars of accommodation linked by a circulation spine. Courtyards are eaten out of the rectangular plan – six blocks of three storeys - in a regular pattern, treated randomly providing a consistent relationship with the external environment and a naturally ventilated principle throughout. The space is covered by a sloping metal roof which provides a developed section of single and double-height spaces within a common building line - classrooms to the front and highly serviced, double height laboratories to the rear. This represents a compact response to the requirement for extending the campus to include a building of significant scale: the use of landscaping to embed it in context and economy of materials to provide a building of varied space and experience.