The programme, twelve weeks
Wednesday 25 November 2026 to Wednesday 3 March 2027. Eight live lunchtime lectures, eleven two-hour seminars released as evening recordings, and 90 hours in your own time on one building.
The shape of the term
Two strands run side by side. The lecture hour is live and shared. The seminars come to you.
- Weeks 1 to 4
- Reading the building 25 November to 16 December. Four consecutive lunchtime lectures. You choose your building and get the survey and the embodied energy account underway.
- Christmas
- Three Wednesdays, no live session 23 and 30 December and 6 January. Seminar releases and your own work continue.
- Weeks 5 to 8
- Designing the upgrade 13 January to 3 February. The last four lunchtime lectures. Strategy, systems and Universal Design land on the case file.
- Weeks 9 to 12
- Making the argument To 3 March 2027. No live lectures. The seminars, the asynchronous material and the case file carry the module to its close.
Where AT6031 sits among the three
AT6012 holds the big picture and the seeing: framing, mapping, atlassing, and the question of which frame makes a thing visible. AT6020 teaches how to tell these stories digitally. AT6031 holds the specific instruments, the ones a learner puts on one existing building. The three share a method and divide the work, and the Wednesday lunchtime hour is where they meet.
The method behind all three carries four words. Comprehensive, because a model names everything it depends on. Anticipatory, asking what the whole system will require without drifting into speculation. Design, the action taken, which includes the decision to leave something alone. Science, holding every finding as a contribution that can shrink, expand or be overturned. On an existing building the third word does the most work, because leaving fabric alone is a design action with an energy account behind it.
The eight lunchtime lectures
Wednesdays 13:00 to 14:00, live online, every one recorded. The hour is open to learners on AT6012 and AT6020 as well, and invited guests are hosted here.
| No. | Date | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wed 25 Nov 2026 | Opening. What the module is, how the case file works, and choosing your building. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 2 | Wed 2 Dec 2026 | Embodied energy in existing fabric. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 3 | Wed 9 Dec 2026 | The values held in existing buildings: historic, aesthetic, environmental, social, community. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 4 | Wed 16 Dec 2026 | Traditional fabric meeting modern materials. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| — | 23 Dec, 30 Dec, 6 Jan | Christmas break. No live sessions across any of the three micro-credentials. |
| 5 | Wed 13 Jan 2027 | Prioritising the strategy: repurposing and energy upgrading. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 6 | Wed 20 Jan 2027 | Renewable energy systems, and what they do to the appearance of a building. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 7 | Wed 27 Jan 2027 | Universal Design in existing buildings. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
| 8 | Wed 3 Feb 2027 | Communicating the technical and social case. Detailed subject to be confirmed |
Lecture subjects allocated from the module content, order to be confirmed
The eight subjects above are the module content as UCC publishes it, laid against the eight dates in the order the six learning outcomes run. The teaching plan for 2026-27 has not fixed which subject falls on which date, so treat the pairing as indicative and the dates as settled. This page is updated as each week is confirmed.
The eleven seminars
Two hours each, released as evening on-demand recordings, one a week across eleven of the twelve weeks.
Release dates and subjects to be confirmed
The seminars carry the material that needs longer than an hour: the worked case studies, the exemplar live projects, and the sessions where an instrument gets run end to end on a real building. Eleven of the twelve teaching weeks carry one. Which week carries which seminar, and the exact release evening, are being confirmed and will be published here before the module opens.
Taken together the eight lectures and the eleven seminars come to 30 hours of session time, which is the basis for the RIAI CPD points the module carries, at one point per hour excluding breaks.
The guest series
Names announced as each acceptance lands
Guests take the shared Wednesday lunchtime hour and are announced at the start of term. Each speaker is named here once they have confirmed the date, and not before.
Your 90 hours
The case file, built a layer at a time.
The asynchronous block is not reading. It is the survey, the accounts, the model and the argument on the building you chose in week one. Each instrument the module hands you produces a layer, and the layers accumulate into a case file that carries a recommendation and the working behind it.
The nine instruments sets out what each one produces, inside the nine-square frame that holds the module's principle, definitions, recipe and cases.
The module studies what it runs on
The instruments are live surfaces on the ENGAGE platform, and what a cohort finds goes back into them. Each learner declares the axioms they are working from, builds an ontology of the building they chose, and grows it into a knowledge graph the next cohort inherits and can argue with. That is what learning in public means here: the record is public, checkable, and it outlives the term.
Dates on this page are read from the UCC module descriptor at ucc.ie/en/at6031, updated 7 August 2026 and re-read 1 September 2026, and from the CCAE delivery schedule. Session counts and the RIAI CPD figure are read from the RIAI CPD course description of 1 September 2026. Anything not yet fixed is marked to be confirmed. Nothing on this page is guessed. Page written 1 September 2026. Cork Centre for Architectural Education, UCC and MTU. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.