PATRICK M C CAFFERY

The ‘Rework’ Project of first semester has been designed to house a public gallery and workspace along The Mall for an artist of our choosing with residency on upper floors.

My client / Artist is a Irish hand felting artist, she uses layers of unspun wool to depict the landscape she is creating. This specific artist was chosen in hopes her evocative and playful work will inspire and attract more people to Mall to rejuvenate the street.

The Design concept was developed around the process of her work , the opening and closing of the pores within the material which open when wet and fuse when dried and finished, architecturally conceptualised by spaces opening and closing above and below each other.

The project brief was to rework an existing building and site in the cultural quarter of Sligo Town Centre, to repurpose for an Artist in Residence, a place for living and working and public engagement. This residence is designed with the client’s work as central to the concept. The client’s are glassblowers from Northern Ireland. Their works involve intricate and delicately designed glass cups and baubles that often have filigrana spiralling around them. The concept of the design is based on the manufacturing process of these works, the way glass is expanded as it spins in the blast furnace.

The floor plates expand the higher one traverses through the building. The basement level is the public space and shop, with the workshop where the glassblowing process takes place. The street level is semi-private, and consists of small walkways that serve purely as access, with stairs serving as the vertical connectors to the public and private spaces. The stairs connecting to the private dwelling spaces spiral to an additional intermediate level, which conceptually relates to the filigrana that the artists are known for. This dwelling is on two levels. The first level contains the bedrooms and bathrooms, and the level above serves as the living and kitchen spaces, completely open to the upper shell of the building and connecting to a balcony on the exterior. The upper floors are connected on the south and east walls, but do not touch the north and west, allowing triple and quadruple height spaces to be achieved in the workspace.

The brief for this project is to rework an existing building and site in the Cultural Quarter of Sligo Town into a place for living and working, and for the wider public to engage with. The ‘Rework’ project serves as a catalyst for the renewal of the area in which the building and site is situated. The building is situated on The Mall forming the historic streetscape found along this street which earliest records show it mapped on the 1689 map of the Fortifications of Sligo, formerly known as Gore Street. The buildings that make up The Mall in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was one of the ‘select’ areas of Sligo town, and was home to many tall grand houses, which were designed for wealthy buyers, with long gardens sloping down towards the Garavogue River. Around 50% of the buildings on The Mall are protected structures, however 17A is not a protected structure but it must be taken into consideration the architectural importance of the building situated on the historic street of The Mall.

Concept: The concept for this project derives from the craft of the client, woodturning. The craft is subtractive. The craftsperson begins with a solid form and through subtraction carves and crafts the piece. Exploration of the design through this concept of working from a solid piece to a finished crafted element when examined looking at 17A specifically, the front street elevation of 17A because of its architectural importance on the streetscape should remain untouched, being the solid raw piece of material and as you move through the building it is carved and crafted. Internally the intention was to create crafted spaces with a centralised void housing the vertical circulation as corten steel staircases 'carve' through the spaces.

Description: The project brief was to rework an existing building and site in the cultural quarter of Sligo Town Centre, to repurpose for an Artist in Residence, a place for living and working and public engagement.

The client was Colm Brennan, a wood turner from Sligo. He makes his pieces by using small blocks glued together in the shape of the object he wants and then turns the wood to give it a smooth finish. I have taken inspiration from the process he uses by making each room an individual block which will be located on either side of the stairs which creates many half levels. For the outside of the building, I have taken inspiration from the material he uses, wood, and used it to clad the exterior of the building. The large window is referencing the large voids he is able to create in his pieces. The client wanted an open-plan workshop where customers are able to see the full process of his work.

Aiming to draw attention to the recentness of the physical forms we best associate with the past and present such as transient impressions of habitation, the projects hopes to explore the ephemerality of architecture within overall historic timelines. The aspiration of which, to elude to the contrast between fast-changing settlement growth/ development within Sligo (Kinetic Morphology) set against the backdrop of a continuous eternal landscape (Static) — an ‘ever-changing’ performance at the foreground of a permanent ‘stage’. Much like the monuments and landscape, the building is to act as the unchanging backdrop to human activity and expression, where the work conducted within is presented as a performative expression within this constant environment.

From its elevated siting, it hopes to provide the same interconnectivity to Sligo and the surrounding geological features as the ‘network’ of neolithic structures. Though Sligo is perceived as part of the landscape, the idea explores the dichotomy of both elements — the city as a changing organism with tangible links to the past and future and the the landscape, the existence of which extends further still. With aims of providing implied/ perceived connection between physical distanced spaces which make up the program of the building across varying vertical levels, the inspiration of its design was derived from the perpetuation of architectural forms, permanence of landscape and the megalithic monuments which now form part of it.

Concept Model: Kinetic model to present an ever-changing inhabitation/movement of the in-between/void around stoic monument, separated yet interconnected, denoting the unchanged landscape with acts as the backdrop to the presence and product of civilisation from early regional settlement to the present day. The projection of light hopes to provide a rhythmic atmosphere and aims to demonstrate that the tangible links we best associate with the past are the product of fleeting moments of human habitation and are of very recent origin — a brief appearance on the overall timeline of human settlement

Yeats Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture