Re-creation on an Urban Shoreline

RE-CREATION ON AN URBAN SHORELINE Grafton Studio + YSoA - DĂşn Laoghaire 2011

re-Creation on an Urban Shoreline Yale School of Architecture Grafton Architects Advanced Design Studio - Fall 2011

Grafton Studio + YSoA - Dún Laoghaire 2011

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Universitá Commerciale Luigi Bocconi photo credit: Federico Brunetti [left] Grafton Architects [below]

between a rock and a hard place, or how to shore up the cliff kurt w. forster

Their studio project at Yale may seem to arise from an altogether different world, but on second thought, it challenges complacent ideas and stimulates architectural imagination, because it shares a fundamental condition with the Bocconi in Milan and with Grafton’s home country of Ireland. Both Ireland and the Bocconi are islands, one washed by rough seas, the other by the tide of urban traffic, both form cliffs of a sort and crumble under the forces that batter or slowly erode them, both pit themselves against their environments by drawing strength from it in the processes of achieving their shape. Selecting a site on edge, framed by a road and water, and returning it to a presence it may once have had while reshaping its nature and use might be said to be the task in a nutshell. Such a site triggers notions of time, read in various states of aggregation or fracture. Each student imagined ways of rescuing a virtually abandoned seaside for new use and enjoyment by means of selecting some elements and relegating others from concern. How each might then gain a meaningful place by newly combining natural and artificial parts spelled out the game plan of the semester.

Introduction

The architects were known to students from lectures and preceded by a reputation that rests on major buildings, such as the new complex for the Bocconi University in Milan and a major project for the university of Toulouse. Whoever has seen the Bocconi realizes at once that it enjoys landmark status in a city that holds many remarkable buildings but few of such a caliber built in recent years. Not since Luigi Moretti’s group of residences and offices on Corso Italia (1951-53) has the arrival of a new urban block so powerfully reshaped the streetscape and its connection with courtyards, passages, stairs and cantilevered volumes as does the new Bocconi. Such work is not only quite unheard of in Milan, but it also restores a notion of city life that rivals some of the best buildings of the last half century. In Milan, the new Bocconi harks back to the administrative seat of the Montecatini Company that Giò Ponti designed in the mid-1930s and the 1940s, but it has few competitors in Berlin after unification or London after the halfhearted Poultney Lane complex dating from James Stirling’s waning years. What endows the Bocconi with exceptional strength is precisely its sensitivity to its tight site and ambivalent role, for, as an educational building, it relies on deep connections with the city’s life and fabric while securing privacy for its institutional activities. To accomplish both and turn the corner in a rousing fashion ensures a performance the city deserves but almost always lacks. Grafton’s choice of Lombard stone—its composite texture and naturally ‘dusty’ color interacting with variously frosted and clear plate-glass—not only suggests a local link, it firms up the variegated volumes and solidifies them in boldly staggered sequence and in deep incisions into the site. With such a building recently completed (2009), Grafton’s studio was preceded by projects that truly speak for themselves.

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Whether an architecture studio succeeds and enables students to latch their thinking to a project is a subject of unending debate. As a rule, the proof is to be found in the pudding and students are the first to remember or forget their experiences. The studio that Shelley McNamarra and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects (Dublin) taught at Yale certainly belongs to the memorable kind or it would not be recorded in this publication.

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Alice Hanratty’s ‘Palazzo’ on Henrietta Street

Alice Hanratty Artist, who very kindly allowed us to use her ‘Palazzo’ on Henrietta Street for one day as the venue for a number of seminars.

Everyone enjoyed being in the wonderful context, with gracious spaces, seeing Alice’s studio and her work (above).

Dominic Stevens Architect, author of Rural, published by Mermaid Turbulence, who presented a coast guard station on the west coast of Ireland and, when describing the power of thinking through drawing, presented beautiful pencil drawings made when he camped out on the site in order to record the place.

Hugh Campbell Professor, Dean and Head of School of Architecture, UCD, and author of The City and the Text: Remembering Dublin in Ulysses; Remembering Ulysses in Dublin, a paper Hugh presented as published in a collection ‘Curating the City’.

Anna Ryan SAUL, author of Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal Explorations of Landscape, Representation and Spatial Experience, published by Ashgate, May 2012.

Conor Skeehan Head of Environment and Planning Department, School of Spatial Planning at DIT, who spoke about the relationship between Dublin city and the sea. He described the Dublin Bay as being the playground of the city, and the constantly changing tidal territories as being the only ‘natural’ landscape left in Ireland.

Grainne Shaffrey Shaffrey Associates Architects, who told us about formation and history of the construction of Dun Laoghaire pier and the new polished concrete surface of Dun Laoghaire pier which she designed with sea shells integrated into the aggregate mix.

Tom Walshe Structural Engineer at Muir Associates Ltd., who presented a verbal analysis of the stable shorelines and the unstable ones, as well as the effect of water currents on land mass and the difference between river currents and sea currents.

John Joyce Irish Marine Institute, who gave a presentation on the rich marine biological life on that stretch of coastline which was the subject of our project.

Sheila O’Donnell and Tiago Faria studio lecturers at the School of Architecture ICD, who generously shared the survey work carried out by their students on this coastline.

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DUBLIN SEMINARS

YALE SEMINARS

Barry McCrea Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University. Barry made a stimulating presentation in the studio about Joyce and the City and took part in the interim and final reviews.

Andres Leipik Author, Curator for architecture exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art. Andres hosted a seminar with the studio discussing his work at MoMA and his recent publication Moderators of Change which presents contemporary examples of social engagement in architecture on a global scale and explores various strategies for how design can actively influence underserved communities.

Martin Cox Professor and studio critic at Yale School of Architecture, architect and principal of the New York office of Bade Stageberg Cox. Martin is the key connection between Ireland and YSoA studio. He met with the students twice a week and traveled to Ireland with the studio.

Critics at interim review: Kenneth Frampton Barry Bergdoll MJ Long Barry McCrea Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen Sunil Bald Alex Felson and Peggy Deamer Critics at Final Review: Keller Easterling David Leatherbarrow Andy Bow Graham Haworth Hanif Kara John Patkau Geoff Shearcroft Dasiy Froud Michael Arad Kurt Forster Sam Jacob Barry McCrea Elizabeth Hatz MJ Long Dean Robert M. Stern

Acknowledgement

We would like to extend our most sincere gratitude to those who have helped make this studio and publication possible.

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When sea meets land, a particular intensity of encounter is set up. The physical properties of the coast as meeting point can be wrapped up in a sense of unceasing mobility: dynamics of light, sound, presence, absence, surface, depth and texture are continually (re)worked and become apparent as alternating activities of construction, destruction and reconstruction. These movements are regular, rhythmic and constant, but are also interspersed by moments of intensity. Nothing is static. Nothing remains the same. These spatial natures of the coast thus tangibly highlight the fluidity of the world – its ongoing and ever-emergent dynamic.

- Anna Ryan, Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal Explorations of Landscape, Representation and Spatial Experience

- Hugh Campell, The City and the Text: Remembering Dublin in Ulysses: Remembering Ulysses in Dublin

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It is through the act of writing that Joyce remembers. Memory, for him, is something produced rather than received – it is active not passive, protean rather than unchanging... Whereas Leopold’s attention was constantly being snagged on event and incident in walking through the city, Molly is uninterrupted and un-distracted.

She remains single-minded, we might say. There’s a pendulum rhythm to this kind of reverie, where you swing from the furthest extremes of fancy to the weighted centre of reality. But the theme is constant, and the theme is sex. ... Joyce’s model of a city experienced randomly, absorbed unthinkingly and remembered vividly… What Joyce is really showing us, is that all those anonymous faces in the crowded city have something worth listening to, memories worth attending to if only you could hear what they’re thinking.

Re-creation on an Urban Shoreline Fall Semester 2011

Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professors Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell with assistant professor Martin Cox

Introduction

We will be investigating the idea of redundancy and excess in our culture. Why is the ordinary undervalued in favour of the novel? Why are new interventions built on the premise that complexity replaces richness? Our theme will be the search for the latent potential of a place or set of conditions and, with a precision of thought and economy of means, the making of minimum interventions to maximum effect.

Imagined worlds will be explored in terms of narrative and unexpected adjacencies of use, users and activities in an attempt to promote the role of the architect in the making of public space from ordinary things.

Project Location

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We have chosen a half-mile length of Dublin coastline which stretches from the Martello Tower at Sandycove Point, to the East pier of Dun Laoghaire Harbour. Known as the Joyce Tower, and now occupied by a museum, the tower is the setting for the opening chapter of Ulysses. From its roof one can watch the ships departing from the harbour to the north, carrying thousands of people.

Today they are mostly tourists, but in the past these ships bore emigrants bound for England and beyond. In the stretch between, is a half-mile of what was once a thriving public bathing place, now redundant and abandoned.

This boundary between town and sea forms a grand ‘amphitheatre’ which overlooks the water.

Laden with a myriad of rich memories and associations, this place is poised to be re-created and transformed. This transformation needs to be imaginatively and strategically conceived in terms of the development of viable alternative approaches to the making of new pieces of urban, social and physical infrastructures.

The project is about making a new piece of urban geography which celebrates the overlap of culture and pleasure; the urban and the natural; stable ground and the unstable changing sea.

Project Working; Tools of the Trade

The studio’s schedule and work sequence is organized so in-depth physical and intellectual investigations take place in parallel, with a strong emphasis on the production of physical models and artifacts as a means of testing and refining work.

Through the exploration of physical models in large and small scales, students will develop their projects concurrently at the measures of the inch and the mile, working in reverse from the physical to the abstract.

Fragments of Joyce’s Ulysses will be chosen, by the students, to feed their imaginative quest, but also because this book, as described by Professor Peter Carl in his lecture ‘What is a city for’, is the most relevant contemporary text in the description of the richness of what city is, was and could be. We will also be using group and collaborative work as a collective resource in the research and design work. In the weeks before coming to Dublin each student will be imagining, and proposing in advance, readings of the place; transformative strategies; concept models. The trip to Dublin will be organized as a testing laboratory, where new pieces of work will be produced in organized workshops. We will be enjoying the input of creative and intellectual colleagues, engineering and fabrication experts in Dublin, who will lead seminars and workshops.

Students will explore the real place in the context of the imagined, and a process of re-evaluation will take place.

Studio Introduction + Project Information

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Studio Brief The project is the design of an outdoor bathing place, consisting of one or more pools for various activities, with attendant relaxation and changing areas. It is intended that the existing baths be integrated into the design, with a view to renewing and rendering ‘viable’ this redundant, neglected resource. Students will be asked to focus on the task of releasing the latent potential of the existing structures and exploring ways of making a new piece of ‘social infrastructure’. Interventions will address the theatrical potential of this place, as well as the making of a re-creational and pleasurable environment. Traditionally these bathing places were extremely popular and involved spontaneous game playing; entertainment; performances by individuals and groups showing off their bodies, their fitness, prowess, skills etc., with both social and sensual overtones.

Since Dun Laoghaire is also a venue for an annual Music Festival, proposals should promote and facilitate the use of one element of the design as a venue for one of the Festival events. Through bringing into play the proposition of Hannah Arendt that architecture is about making ‘places of public appearance’, this will allow the student to build on the existing remnants of ‘theatre’ in the sense of how this piece of shoreline addresses the sea.

The site has many resources which could be exploited in the making of this new piece of urban geography. Students will be free to develop individual briefs in terms of unexpected adjacencies of other uses which might act as a catalyst for the life of the project. The text of Ulysses will be promoted as a model for the rich, labyrinthine urban life that makes up real cities.

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We will be exploring economy of means; duality of use; low- key, powerful, imaginative interventions, grounded in terms of how storms and the forces of wind and waves are tempered to provide a self –sufficient pleasurable microclimate.

Site 1:Bath house Nicky Chang Ilsa Falis Tom Fryer Seema Kairam James Sobczak

Site 2: Promenade Cotton Estes Rafael Ng Dawood Rouben

Site 3: 40 Foot

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Ashley Ozburn Craig Woehrle

Program + Sites

Site 1:

Site 2:

Site 3:

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Group site models at 1:50

‘Imagined world’ models at 1:50

12 scale 1:50 Group Site Models

Precedent studies (model scale varies)

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Week 1: Imagined World Charcoal drawings

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Student Work: Cotton Estes

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Cotton Estes

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- 2.0 METERS

SPRING LOW TIDE

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Student Work: Cotton Estes

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Student Work: Cotton Estes

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< perspective from the city

< elevation from the sea

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In order to introduce minimum interventions and achieve maximum effect, the modest structure is proposed to built with simple formwork and concrete recycled from the ruins of the 19th century Victorian bath house.

Student Work: Nicky Chang

Nicky Chang

Strategically placed at the focual point of the half mile coastline that stretches between the Joyce Tower and the West pier of Dun Laoghaire Harbour, the proposed artist residency and bath house combines the narrative of a private life with unexpected adjacencies of public programs including a small lecture hall and a reading room. The rather small structure bridges the street level to the sea level, both dynamic in their own nature. Echoing the structure of Joyce Tower, all the service and vertical circulations are organized within the thickened walls around the central atrium; the private and public paths are stacked on top of each other and are visually connected through various frames and openings, but they never actually meet. This â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;telescopicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, three-dimensional esplanade leads to the roof cloister, where small performances and readings events can be held against the panoramic view of the shoreline.

< observation deck

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< roof cloister

< artist residency

< public reading room

< lecture/concert space

< thermal bath & public changing rooms

private world

circulation/ service wall

public life N

< site plan in relation to the sea SITE PLAN 1:500

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and the demolished bath house

< telescopic public promenade

Student Work: Nicky Chang

< unfolded circulation wall - private path

Grafton Studio + YSoA - DĂşn Laoghaire 2011

site plan

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Ilsa Falis

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This design repurposes a derelict public bathing house on a stretch of coastline south of Dublin.

The footprint of the existing structure is maintained while new enclosure is created to house public changing rooms, a cafe, and a sunken spa with both heated pools and an outlet into the ocean. A plaza on the upper level creates a linkage of green spaces by extending an existing park to the edge of the shore. The character of the public spaces on the upper level and those of the semi-private sunken spas differ based on material expression, lighting strategies, and calibrated sensory input.

Student Work: Ilsa Falis

study models

section

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spa level perspective

ocean-front perspective

plaza level perspective

Student Work: Ilsa Falis

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sketch of existing condition

axonometric of spa

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Tom Fryer

The scheme proposes the removal of the existing baths and an occupation of the new topography, the newly exposed edges, corners and surfaces of which are used to reconnect the severed seafront paths and establish a new type of promenade. Bluffs are inhabited, stairs traverse granite faces and paths carve and ramp over the surface of the land.

The transition from the relatively protected, clothed state to the exposed mode of swimming is sudden but made comfortable by simple amenities - ample sunlight, control of air via operable devices, heated floor slabs and a shielding architecture that mediates the exposed windward fringes of the site.

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Pathwalking is a linear activity, as is swimming laps. As the interface between these two modes of movement, the pavilions on the site seek to achieve rapid repositionings of bodies in space.

Structures find a protective expression here, clamping to the rock against the forces of the wind and the sea, cradling and enfolding their occupants as they enter and exit.

AA

BB

CC

Student Work: Tom Fryer

Charting a position between preservation and performative intervention, the remnant landscape is engaged as a key component of the site, where an uncurated selection of local flora self-organizes to form a site-specific and opportunistic garden. It is a landscape that is inaccessible but monitored; advocating observation of an experimental condition.

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Student Work: Tom Fryer

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< section model 1 : 50

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Seema Kairam

This scheme proposes to add two new programs to the site, one completely accessible to the public, a cafe and the other a semi-public marine education center. The cafe, located near the street, creates an urban gathering spot and acts as a frame to the larger collection of buildings and walkways. The marine education center completes the campus. A large classroom building and lecture hall will host educational programs for the local Dublin schools and provide community space for the surrounding neighborhood. The marine laboratories allow for free flowing access between the water and teaching space for students, whereas the spaces further up the banks provide more formal teaching spaces while still maintaining visual connections to the sea. The three buildings wrap a new water filled landscape consisting of small piers and retaining walls that will create different types of ecosystems by varying the rates of tidal wash. This new landscape of marine life will be basis of the hands-on teaching curriculum as well as a new point of focus on the larger public promenade.

< tidal studies

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Highest Low Tide

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< marine education center

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Lowest High Tide

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< access to tidal pools and outdoor teaching facilities

Student Work: Seema Kairam

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Lowest Low Tide

Street Level Scale 1:200

< second floor - classrooms

Waterfront Level Scale 1:200

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> section through lecture hall

< street level - offices and library

< water level - marine laboratories

< section through cafe Student Work: Seema Kairam

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Ashley Ozburn

< imagined world Student Work: Ashley Ozburn

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> cross section

> longitudinal section

> elevation from the sea

Student Work: Ashley Ozburn

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Dawood Rouben

Student Work: Dawood Rouben

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Student Work: Dawood Rouben

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Grafton Studio + YSoA - Dún Laoghaire 2011

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James Sobczak

Student Work: James Sobczak

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Carefully nestling into the side of the coastline, this proposal for the redevelopment of the Dun Laoghaire Baths tries to navigate a careful balance between retaining the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historic memory and simultaneously providing a new, vibrant public amenity. In addition to rekindling the long dormant bathing program, this project augments the Baths with the addition of a community learning center, a street-level art gallery, and space for a privately run cafe or restaurant - all programs aimed at attracting people to the coastline on a sustainable, year-round basis. By restricting the new projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s footprint to that of the existing Baths and by retaining all existing non-conditioned spaces (retaining walls, outdoor changing rooms, swimming pools, and terraced seating areas), the project acts as a palimpsest of the new and the old. Rather than exclaiming its presence, this project instead chooses to engage with the long tradition of aggregation and acculturation of small scale architectural interventions that give this particular stretch of oceanfront its beauty and whimsical charm.

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Student Work: James Sobczak

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Justin Trigg

t Sea 7.

Student Work: Justin Trigg

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STRUCTURALLY, A CONCRETE FIN SYSTEM PLACED WITHIN REFERENCES THE CADENCE OF THE ORIGINAL BUILDING WHILE SIMPLY SUPPORTING:

- THE EXISTING WALLS & - NEW WALLS/PROMENADE PATH THROUGH THE GRANITES, & - THE FLEXIBLE EDUCATION SPACES

SELECTIVELY REUSING THE EXTERIOR THE GRANITES INHABIT THE SHELL OF THE VICTORIAN BATHS,

WALLS,

PROVIDING A HUMAN HARBOR FROM THE SEA AND REKNITTING THE PIER

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CIRCULATION WITH THE PARK BELOW.

THE GRANITES MAINTAIN THE FOOTPRINT OF EXISTING BATH COMPLEX, UNCOVERING THE GRANITE OUTCROPPING UNDERNEATH AND INVESTIGATING THEIR POTENTIAL.

AERIAL COLLAGE VIEW FROM EAST

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Student Work: Justin Trigg

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Craig Woehrle From available aerial imagery, this particular location stood out as a soft, accessible anomaly amidst the rocky geology typical of the rest of the Scottsman Bay coastline. In addition to its anomalous geologic character, an abrupt termination of the public promenade existed as one boundary of the Sandy Cove experience.

Between Sandy Cove and what is known to the locals as the “40 foot” now exists a private house and grounds that form this boundary.

Student Work: Craig Woehrle

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What could be achieved by clearing this impediment and completing the public circuit from the “East Walk” of the Dun Laoghaire Harbor wall, to the “40 Foot” bathing place, on to the Joyce Tower and back? What public program would intensify the experience of this hinge point?

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Student Work: Craig Woehrle

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Yale School of Architecture Advanced Design Studio - Fall 2011 Grafton Architects Yvonne Farrell Shelley McNamara Assistant Professor Martin Cox

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Students Nicky Chang Cotton Estes Ilsa Falis Tom Fryer Seema Kairam Rafael Ng Ashley Ozburn Dawood Rouben James Sobczak Craig Woehrle