The contribution of this research - and the Conservation Management Plan it produced for St Brendan's as one of its key outputs - does not lie within its individual proposals. Rather the project has been designed to communicate the values inherent within the school to a variety of audiences and provide tools to aid the decision-making necessary to manage the school's future life. This concerned using a series of methodologies to observe and record a necessarily broad range of phenomena, from subjective, intimate, and personal experiences with the building, to the scientific measuring of its environmental conditions and fabric performance. Of pivotal importance was the development of new ways of seeing, which sought to integrate the three dimensions of modernity with the means of both valuing and visualising often complex invisible phenomena such as, for example, the social life of the school. In many ways, the project reflects the Doyles' original conceptual thinking that articulated the design of the school as an open system, an extendable matrix that - while located on the periphery of a small town in the midlands of Ireland - embodied principles, techniques, strategies, and methods of communication that are essentially site-less. There is then a corollary between the building's design intent and the methods of analysis developed and deployed to understand and value it. In both instances they lend themselves to other, future iterations, to change and elaboration, to difference without undermining the integrity of either. While the range and techniques involved in describing St Brendan's responded specifically to the school's attributes, the overall approach and strategy of combining technological, social, and historic data is evidently transferable. For other buildings and typologies, different subsets of criteria or phenomena may emerge and be substituted for the ones described here, but still remain as essential components within a similar overall framework of analysis.
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