Open Doors

Open Doors to the Future

Engaging teenagers in subjects like townscape and heritage sounds like a bit of a turn-off.  Well, for the teenagers, at any rate.  So an invitation from St Joseph’s College, in Derry’s Creggan Estate, to collaborate with its Geography and Art teachers and their Year 10 classes, on an entry for the 2012 Northern Ireland Environment Agency’s ‘Open Doors to the Future’ competition, was a welcome opportunity to help a class of fourteen year-old boys develop a conservation plan for an old building near their school.

Former Rosemount Shirt Factory, Derry

Focusing on the listed, almost vacant former Rosemount Shirt Factory nearby, we devised and delivered a series of three interactive workshops engaging the boys in the same process undertaken by an architect preparing a conservation plan.   All kinds of innovative, entrepreneurial thinking to give this building sustainable new uses emerged.  This included:

• Converting the old Rosemount Shirt Factory into the ‘Mountrose Hotel’ for Derry~Londonderry’s UK City of Culture 2013
• Turning its flat roof into a swimming pool and putting a glass dome on top
• Using the top floor as penthouse apartments.
• Paying guests were to include celebrities such as Rhianna, Beyoncé and Paris Hilton!

The boys’ creative entry achieved first prize in its age category and they received their prize from Minister Alex Attwood, DoE (NI).

Representatives of St Joseph’s College Year 14 with their ‘Open Doors to the Future 2012’ Award

St Joseph’s Year 14 pupil sketching his favourite detail on the old Rosemount factory

Recapping likes and dislikes about the factory on a mind map

Demolish or not? Points for and against the motion

Year 6 Moving Image class film footage contributed to the project website

Mountrose Hotel, pupils’ designs for marketing brochures