Pascall + Watson Architects believes that good design makes buildings enjoyable to use, efficient to build, and elegant to behold. These are key drivers of the design for the National Train Control Center in Dublin, with an added focus on creating an efficient and refined working environment.

Since the 1970s, Ireland’s trains have been under the control of Iarnród Éireann’s Centralised Traffic Control Center (CTC) at Connolly Station in Dublin. During the past five decades track, signaling, and communications infrastructure have been replaced and upgraded as workload at the existing CTC increased. The center reached capacity many years ago, and technology available to operatives became outdated. As a result, a location appraisal was undertaken, which identified a site at Dublin’s Heuston Station as the preferred location for a new facility — the National Train Control Center (NTCC). Surrounded by railway lines on three sides and predominantly used for storage, it was an otherwise underutilized space that had potential to be developed into something unique.

The facades of the main building were carefully designed to ensure it would help to reduce the scale of the large volumes of windowless space housing the essential plant andequipment. Swisspearl fiber cement rainscreen cladding above ground floor level is punctured by a delicate projecting detail surrounding each window, which creates a subtle relief from the overall volume. Similarly, the scale and configuration of the Swisspearl panels, which may appear to be random, were instead a considered design choice to visually reduce the scale of the building whilst still allowing the volume to be read as a coherent whole.

Please note that this Reference project features Patina products. However, since the colour range for Patina NXT is the same, this reference also provides a general impression of the look and feel of a Patina NXT project.