One University, Three Places | University Design Forum Conference Belfast

One University, Three Places

The session on Ulster University’s campuses at this year’s University Design Forum conference in Belfast was introduced quietly, but was one of the most thought-provoking of the two days. Ana Teresa Cristóbal of Page\Park Architects presented the masterplanning work across Ulster University’s three campuses — Belfast, Derry~Londonderry and Coleraine — each profoundly different in character. For Belfast a vertical city campus in the tight lanes of the Cathedral Quarter, completed after twelve years on site. Derry is an intimate city presence, within terraced landscape enclosed by walls. Coleraine sits on the River Bann, built to the original RMJM Masterplan, adjusted since, with views to the Causeway Coast.

The masterplanning challenge was not to impose a unified aesthetic across three such different places, but to find underlying principles that give each coherence as a single institution. Consistency of approach does not mean uniformity of experience. Each campus belongs to its neighbours, its setting, its specific faculties and communities. Yet moving between them, you know you are part of the same network — the same values, the same ambition, the same sense of what Ulster University is for.

This is harder than it sounds. The temptation in multi-campus masterplanning is to apply a visual language everywhere — a palette, a signature move — producing places that feel branded rather than belonging. The better approach is structural: identify the principles that matter to the institution, and trust each place to express and manifest these values in their own terms.

What gives this work an additional dimension is its funding context. The Irish Government committed €44.5 million from the Shared Island Fund for a new teaching building at the Derry campus, part of a broader cross-border investment in higher education. Ulster University was recognised as a “force for good in fostering peace, prosperity and cohesion,” a safe and inclusive place for all. A key-stone institution in a region transformed in the quarter-century since the Good Friday Agreement, the Belfast campus hosted President Biden on his visit to mark that anniversary.

These are not incidental facts, architecture in this context carries weight beyond the functional — a campus that reconnects a divided city, through cross-border investment. It is a realisation of what a shared future might look like: less division, less inequality of provision, less historical under-investment in communities that needed it most. That is what More with Less can mean at its most serious.

The third and final reflection on the conference by Rupert Cook, Partner and Trustee of University Design Forum.