AT6031 · the measuring end of the three
AT6012 holds the big picture and the seeing. AT6020 teaches how to tell these stories digitally. AT6031 holds the specific instruments, the ones you put on one existing building and read off an answer you can defend.
Where do the instruments sit in the frame?
The nine-square is the module's organising instrument, developed at SCI-Arc and presented at the Buckminster Fuller Institute around 1994 to 1995. Position is address and position carries meaning: the general sits north, the special sits south, definitions sit west, tools sit east, and the live instance is the centre cell where a principle meets a case and one of them gives way.
The frame is the same one AT6012 runs on. What changes is the principle it is built around, because each module points it at its own subject. Select a cell. One carries a red edge, and it is the cell nobody has filled yet. Leaving it visible is the point.
The east cell, opened out
Each one takes the building you chose in week one and returns a layer of the case file. They run in the order below, and each later one depends on the ones above it. Where a published tool exists it is linked. Where the module has no tool yet, the card says so in gold and names what the seminars cover instead.
What the building is actually made of, layer by layer, and how confident you are about each answer. Construction date, wall build-up, glazing, roof, floor, and the parts you could not open up.
The energy already spent in the fabric that is standing. This is the number the whole module turns on, and the one most retrofit appraisals leave out.
The five values the module names in existing buildings: historic, aesthetic, environmental, social and community. Read them before you propose anything, because a proposal that damages one of them has to say so.
Where the building sits against the Irish building energy standards, and which standard is the right target for it. Traditional fabric and contemporary standards do not always meet comfortably.
What each intervention buys, what it costs, and what it spends in new embodied energy to save operational energy. The trade the principle names, made arithmetic.
Which renewable system suits this building, and what it does to the appearance of it. The aesthetic and material consequence is part of the selection and not an afterthought.
Whether the building can be used by the widest range of people in the widest range of situations, and what the refurbishment should change. Universal Design runs through the whole module and it lands here.
The seven layers above, assembled into one document that carries a recommendation and every piece of working behind it. Somebody who disagrees with your recommendation should be able to find the line where they part company with you.
The same case, put to one audience you name: academic, public, regulatory, community or professional. The sixth learning outcome is this one, and it is assessed as its own thing.
The shared Wednesday hour is the tenth thing and it is not an instrument. It is the hour where the three micro-credentials meet, where guests are hosted, and where somebody else looks at your building and asks the question you had stopped asking. The programme has the dates.
Sources. The five values, the module content and the six learning outcomes are read from the UCC module descriptor at ucc.ie/en/at6031, updated 7 August 2026 and re-read 1 September 2026. The definitions in the west cell and the two citation pairs in the north-west cell are read from the ENGAGE glossary and bibliography, where each pair carries its own rationale. The nine-square frame and its declared cell roles come from the module's own navigator, developed at SCI-Arc and presented at the Buckminster Fuller Institute around 1994 to 1995.
Every instrument here is structural and none is predictive. Each one shows what a change of frame or a change of assumption reveals. None of them says a number will move by an amount, and where a figure appears it carries the working that produced it.
Page written 1 September 2026. Cork Centre for Architectural Education, UCC and MTU. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.