This yearbook was published by UCD Architecture on the occasion of the end of year show 2009–10 on 28th May 2010.
Copyright the editors, students, authors, photographers and UCD Architecture. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers.
EDITORS
Peter Cody Deirdre McKenna PHOTOGRAPHY
Alice Clancy Stephen Tierney (unless otherwise credited)
DESIGN
Conor & David ISBN 978-1-905254-47-7
Printed in Ireland by Hudson Killeen
UCD Architecture University College Dublin Richview, Clonskeagh Dublin 14, Ireland Tel: +353 1 7162757 www.ucd.ie/architecture
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
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143 (above) Section showing view from interior (opposite) Plans Hannah Hughes
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
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Plan Layers and Corresponding Site Sections Conor McGowan
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Workshops
Students Elizabeth Bourke Phoebe Brady Domhnaill Byrne Rebecca Carroll Conor Clinton Thomas Conlon James Corboy Michael Corcoran Alan Coughlan Kate Cregan Beibhinn Delaney Sarah Doheny Mark Doherty Bronagh Doyle Jude Duffy Eleanor Duignan Aisling Donnelly Avril Dunne Muireann Egan Aprar Elawad Michael Farrell Liam Farrelly Ellen Fitzgerald Thomas Fletcher Rachel Gallagher Niamh Gilmore Donal Groarke
Fiona Harte Clive Hennessy Donn Holohan Andrew Howell Hannah Hughes Greg Jackson Daen Kelly Eimear Kilgarriff Stanislav Kravets Jill L’Estrange Sean Lynch Jennifer Martin Hugh McDermott Damian Milton Daniel Moran Ultan O’Conchubhair Carla Peters Laoise Quinn Robert Reid Fiona Shiels Mary Smith William Spratt-Murphy Ekaterina Tikhoniouk Rebecca Vickers Keith Walsh Amy Widdis Simona Yonkova
Four week-long workshops were offered to Year 2 students prior to their second semester study trip. Pocket Guide Publication Wendy Barrett, Alice Clancy, James Rossa O’Hare Cohesive Construction Andrew Clancy, Colm Moore JOIN
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Anne Gorman, Orla Murphy Set Design
Fiona Hughes, Kevin Donovan
Join Group Studies in situ Photos by Orla Murphy
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147 JOIN The JOIN workshop ran in conjunction with the GMIT Furniture College in Letterfrack, through collaboration with Laura Mays and Anthony Clare from GMIT. It sought to share the skills of students at UCD and GMIT by exploring the relationship between conceptual
consideration of material, the space that material can create, and the physical act of making. Under the theme of The Part and The Whole students were assigned materials of set dimension and asked to use these materials in any way to respond to the theme.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Set Design Workshop
Student Set Designs at the Project Cube Theatre Photos by Kevin Donovan
This workshop was a brief introduction to the creative processes involved in representing a play in a theatre. Over two and a half days, and in collaboration with architect and designer Alyson Cummins, 8 students made proposals for the setting of several scenes from Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight in the Project (Cube) Theatre. The work included the survey of the theatre space and the construction of a model box, the elaboration of story boards and moment drawings and the making of 1:25 model proposals. The work was reviewed on the last afternoon by stage designer Joseph Vanek.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 1
Publication: Pocket Guide To Barcelona An integral aspect of architectural training is to learn to represent architecture and information effectively. This workshop aimed to develop these skills through the production of a pocket guide to Barcelona, illustrating the city and its architecture, in advance of the Year 2 class visit there.
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Production Line Photo by Alice Clancy
(opposite) Students sketching at Igualada Cemetery Photo by Alice Clancy
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SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Barcelona, Spain Year 2 Trip 17th–22nd March 2010
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(right) Models in situ (opposite) Students sketching the Barcelona Pavilion Photos by Alice Clancy
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SCHOOL TRIP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Italy Year 4 Trip 18th–22nd March 2010
A morning spent with Luigi Snozzi in Monte Carasso begining with a lecture in the restored convent of St Augustus.
Luigi Snozzi Photo by Marcus Donaghy
(opposite) Aurelio Galfetti Photo by Luke O’Callaghan
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SCHOOL TRIP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Switzerland Year 4 Trip 19th March 2010
A journey through Bellinzona with Aurelio Galfetti from the Castelgrande to kitchen table; the landscape, history, geology and hydrology of Switzerland unfold through the ensuing discourse of an “architecture of intervention”, students’ sketchbooks employed in quick sucession for impromtu graphic illustration – serving afterwards as an aide-mémoire.
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EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 1
Evening Conversations
Lectures 21st September 2009
Francis Matthews, Laura Kelly and Stephen Tierney discuss image making
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22nd September 2009
Prof. Ole Vangaard opens the erasmus exhibition 23rd September 2009
Hugh Campbell and recent work by O’Donnell + Tuomey 24th September 2009
Recent work by Boyd Cody Architects and Donaghy Dimond Architects The Interior Prospect
Year 4 & 5 Group Tutorial
Stephen Tierney
Photo by Joe Flood
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Travellers’ Inn Staging post for coaches and travellers Cashel, County Tipperary
Tutors Peter Cody Stephen Tierney
Students Peter Cosgrove Joe Flood Alison Hyland Cillian Magee Roisín Ní Bhuadain Patrick Roche Enida Skalonjic Ruth Stewart Robert Tobin James Young Anna Zabiegala Blaine Cagney James Casey Shea Gallagher Emer Hanratty Sarah Maguire Therese Nolan Lisa O’Kane
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Cashel Site Plan Collaborative Drawing
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Backland Site Plan Ciarรกn Conlon
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Detailed Study Ciarรกn Conlon
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164 Sections in Context Ciarรกn Conlon
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(opposite) Section and Interior Material Study (left) Plans
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(below) Site Section James Casey
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Townland
Tutors Orla Murphy Fiona Hughes
Students Gillian Brady Blaine Cagney Amy Fitzgerald Emmet Kenny
TownLand explores the relationship between the space of the contemporary Irish town and the land that lies beyond it. Group members began their research by carrying out a series of tasks in a town of their choice. Four towns of different size, character and morphology were selected: Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, Shannon, Co. Limerick and Birr, Co. Offaly. A range of scales, media and techniques were used as lenses for this mapping. Out of this examination of place, each student developed an hypothesis about the municipal space of the town within the context of the rural landscape. Collectively these thesis projects propose an architecture that values the role of dignified and importantly relevant civic space in the continuing evolution of the Irish country town. Carrickmacross is a market town overlaid on a drumlin belt. Views open between buildings capturing movement, routine and ritual, which appear and disappear into the undulating hinterland. Main Street dips and bows, terminated at each end by a public space controlled by civic buildings.
Gillian Brady’s project for a Primary Health Centre is sited to become a new civic building within this pattern that facilitates wellbeing and connection to garden. The scale of civic space is considered from the far-out view of the landscape to the close-up detail of how a threshold is made.
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Drumlin Model Gillian Brady
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Blaine Cagney’s project explores the relationship of a dairy farm to its local country town of Ballingarry. A spatial and functional relationship that revolves around daily routines of milking, transport, processing and trade. Re-calling the cooperative typology, the brief for a dairy processing co-op and market evokes the familiar, direct and tangible nature of local ritual to re-shape the public space of a small country town.
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Market Square Blaine Cagney
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A modern town designed at the scale of the car and airplane, the urban form of Shannon is low density without a physical centre. The town turns its back on its greatest resource, the Shannon estuary. Amy Fitzgerald’s design for a Water Research Centre on the bank of the estuary facilitates investigation into this vitally important resource and prompts a connection between water, land and town. The project sees context as a tool to knit the fabric of a building into its site.
Section Amy Fitzgerald
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
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Birr in Co. Offaly is revealed as an almost utopian settlement, carefully planned and aggregated over time by its resident landlord. Its urban fabric responded with thought and measure to the needs of its community and reflected its nodal connection to regional networks of movement, post, health and education. As these change to become national in place of regional or virtual in place of physical, Emmet Kenny’s project for a Public House and restoration of Emmet Square seeks to reinforce the physical connection of the public space of town to the community it serves.
Ground & Elevation Emmet Kenny
(opposite) Students at Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects lecture Photo by Alice Clancy
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LANDSCAPE
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& CULTURE Temple of Aphaia, Aegina, Greece Photo by William Murphy
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On Architecture as Art Theo Dorgan
ESSAY / THEO DORGAN
It may well be that among architects, privately, there is a great deal of discussion centred on architecture as an art form, but if this is so, precious little of any such discussion filters out into the culture at large.
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Architects in our time, in our place, are only rarely considered or discussed as artists, only rarely speak of themselves as artists – with the corollary, that architects in their formation are not encouraged to think of themselves as artists. This is both a-historical and an impoverishment of the culture in general. Superficially, it’s easy enough to see why the idea of the architect as artist has become obscured in the present moment. For one thing the work practices of architects have become rather more collective than was the case in even the recent past, making it difficult enough to recognize the signature contribution or aesthetic of individual architects; for another, the ascendancy of the client (and the client’s balance sheet) during the recent years of greed-driven building has tended to focus attention on the utilitarian value of buildings, at the expense of their aesthetic qualities.
Of course significant buildings of enduring aesthetic value have been built in our time – but it seems to this outsider that architects in general, some outstanding buildings aside, have become curiously reticent about claiming artistic value for their work. Architects, like artists in many other fields, have developed a curious shame about beauty. Some of this is to do with a larger crisis of confidence in the culture as a whole, especially among the makers: we have all of us in one way or another come under pressure to monetise our work, to defend our practice on grounds of its commercial or economic value. There have been other kinds of demands, for instance that art should align itself to the prescriptions of political or social agenda-setters. From the left, artists have had demands made on them that their work should be ‘socially useful’ – according to ill-defined criteria which rarely amount to much more than reflexive squawkings of bourgeois
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guilt. From the right we have had to defend ourselves against charges that art is parasitic and unproductive of economic value, is ‘unrealistic’ and immature when it is not spitefully subversive of good sense and common values. As is usual in these periods of uncertainty, faced by conflicting demands from outside themselves, artists have reacted in different ways: some by retreating from a robust belief in the value of what they do into a kind of wounded silence, some by adopting a kind of protective camouflage, disguising their work inside the rhetoric of some party line, and yet others by denying that they are, in fact, artists at all. Many, of course, just sail on past, getting on with the work. Now it’s difficult for a poet to go on publishing poems while denying that writing poetry is in fact what they do; equally, it’s difficult for a painter to deny painting, a composer to deny she is making music; architects, however, seem to me in many cases to be subsuming themselves inside collective practice, and to present their work in public as if they were problem solvers of a rarefied kind in the business of engineering, wedding organizers presiding over the shotgun marriage of money and concrete. I am, of course, caricaturing things here, the situation is neither as simple nor as desperate as I seem to be suggesting, but for all that, there is a real problem in all this.
I can perhaps frame the problem between two quotations from modern masters: The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. —Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. —Mies van der Rohe
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Lloyd Wright’s language will scarcely appeal to the hard-headed moneymaker types of our time – many of whom are clearly without fathers, some of whom are, I suspect, brought into the world without benefit of mothers. The cluster of ideas that hover around the word ‘mother’ in his formulation includes nurturing, quiet, repose, longevity, lineage and benign authority; more problematic to contemporary taste are the words “soul” and “civilisation”, yet they point to, encourage, a cast of mind as irreducible in the furnace of the moment as it will prove necessary in the coming times. Lloyd Wright, to put this as clearly as I can, understands that the making of art is fundamentally a human endeavour – perhaps I should say, is a fundamental human act. Mies, on the other hand, has had a mesmeric appeal for those self-styled ‘masters of the universe’ who have brought the developed world to its present unlovely condition and, in their blind
arrogance, have brought many an agnostic to a point where, unable to believe in God, they are certainly willing to believe in the Devil. The cant of this type is, in a curious reversal of Marx, that the unfolding of markets, the engrossing of wealth, is a function of impersonal forces at work in the world – they see no reason to value any human not concerned with the service of Mammon – theirs is a world where ‘Miesian’ architecture can be indefinitely reproduced by a cheap laptop, properly programmed. “Architecture is the will of an epoch…” – how easy to imagine the sentence issuing from the mouth of Albert Speer. If there is something properly repulsive about the naked will to power, there is something sleazy and unhealthy about an idea of art that sees art as the handmaiden of power. Imagine Mies had said: “Politics is the will of an epoch translated into action”… Between these points of view there is a great gulf fixed. Anyone now in training as an architect might usefully consider what, in fact, the difference is between these two points of view. The distinction can be made with brutal simplicity: you can be an architect-artist, finding lessons and echoes in sibling arts that develop your understanding of your own, you can see yourself as a human being engaged in a profoundly human activity – or you can be a cipher, an empty soul in the service of empty-hearted, arbitrary power.
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All good art comes out of a community of shared and inherited meanings, agreed values. Truly great art will find its truths at a slant to those values, will often upset, reverse or reformulate those values, but great art is never arbitrary – or for that matter abstract, that is to say, divorced entirely from the material world we share with others, from our common tradition, our common human story. All genuine artists know that only when you have understood the past can you try to make something new in the present that might, just possibly, endure in that future where it will become the past of some artist yet unborn. That is the bluntest truth I can think of for any artist. There is no substitute for humility before the dead, camaraderie with the living, personal courage and discipline – and a healthy wish to leave something of value behind when you go, for the benefit of the unborn. All this, of course, inescapably, requires a great deal of hard work, a willingness to immerse oneself in the tradition, to learn from the past as the precondition for developing a style and courage of one’s own. This is, as everyone knows, an attitude inimical to the spirit of the present age, where a 14 year old boy winning a heat in a TV talent competition will blurt out “Oh thank you, thank you, this is what I’ve dreamed of all my life.” The architectural expression of this mindset is post modernism. This unlovely (and thankfully short-lived) fever had its roots in the childish idea
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that one could arbitrarily appropriate elements of past styles as garnishes on pedestrian architecture, in the deluded belief that one was making something new by stealing ignorantly and at random from the dead. (Incidentally, the most grotesque example I can think of is the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The work of a paranoid colour-blind Legomaniac, it is in its own weird way the perfect objective correlative for the work and persons of the unlovely service it houses.) “The mother art is architecture…” – among other things, I think Lloyd Wright means us to understand that to make shelter, home, temple and theatre is a primal and ancient impulse, one carried on from generation to generation. This is not, properly understood, a conservative proposition in itself; it asks of us only that we identify and respect what is good and eternal (‘recurring’, if ‘eternal’ makes you uneasy) in what humans make. A revolutionary himself, Lloyd Wright saw no need to stake his identity as a grown artist on the death of the mother. The point is to be an adult, not a matricide. And the point of being an adult is, surely, to stand on your own two feet – the ambition of any good mother, of course being that her child will grow to do exactly that. One could say, of course, that Lloyd Wright is being a touch sentimental – not everything mother tells us is true, as we know – and there is something
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to be said for Mies’ unremarkable intuition that the spirit of an age is reflected in its architecture – but it is not my business here to set up one against the other. I choose these quotations because they seem to me to point up an interesting moment in the education of young architects, a choice if you wish. A young architect today who is not grounded in the history of the art, who is not taught that architecture is art, seems to me to be facing into a hollow second-class professional life. One must immerse oneself in the lineage before breaking free. It seems to me, too, that to launch yourself at expressing “the spirit of the epoch” is a snare and a delusion – as setting yourself an abstract target always is. This state of mind, distressingly commonplace at the moment, is properly termed ‘empty dreaming’. The trick is to situate yourself exactly where you stand in space and time, confident of and aware of the past, alive in the present, expectant of the future. The past is full of unfathomable riches, lodged in the obliging matrix of memory. Some of it, as you will discover, is not without merit. More importantly, in the study of the past you will find you are exercising memory, training memory to sift and store, ultimately to retrieve when needed, the spur to imagination when, at last, you have the opportunity to shine.
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And what will it mean, to shine? To make something beautiful, powerful and meaningful that will endure in memory. Let me give one simple example. The Temple of Aphaia, on the north-eastern corner of the island of Aegina, is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Reduced to bare bones by the passage of time, it no longer has the polychrome intensity that must have struck its first users with such force. Too, the function for which it was designed is no longer available to us, our belief-systems have changed so radically, and we cannot hope to recapture the sense of community that must have given the building its charge of meaning and power. So, why should it have such a powerful effect on us still? Well, the site for a start. The classical Greeks had a profound sensitivity to location, and very often chose places of immense intrinsic felt power as sites for their most important buildings. Almost all Greek temples are built on sites of great geomantic power, very often sites that have long cultic histories before ever being chosen as sites for buildings. They used the word temenos, sacred space, for such locations. The architect would have been schooled in what we might call the prehistory of the site, alive to the powers of the site, familiar with other temples built on similar sites, conversant with the uses to which the temple would be put. He (this is a long time ago) would also have known, without making a fuss about it, that he was sending
his building into the future – without putting any particular value on that. It’s just that, well, they built to last – in stone on a stable site, in an equable climate, in a settled society. To me, visiting today, these are speaking stones. They echo and somehow complete the surrounding context – bare sun-broken rock, deep-shaded pinewoods, the sea glittering far below, the bowl of the sky a deep rich blue overhead. I sense the hand that shaped the stone, I am entranced by the dance of proportion and measure, I hear the music of geometry, I feel myself in the presence of living minds. Here is architecture that I understand as I understand a poem – and I am sure a musician would understand this temple as she understands the architectonics of a piece of music. There is a mystery here, and the heart of the mystery is that the building speaks across time. It endures across time and in time, it commands the experience of itself, it lives in the space it inhabits, in a slow dance with time, decay and the eternal. It isn’t done to say so, but every work of art expresses an ambition on the part of its maker that the work will outlast the time of its making. This is a right and proper ambition for an artist, but it comes at a price few are prepared to pay: you must learn to serve your art with true humility, choosing the survival of the work over the survival of your name if that’s the deal you’re offered.
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We cannot live outside history, in a willed dreamtime of our own, a kind of defiant solipsism, and nor can our work be free of the watermark of the time we live in, the world and the language we share with others. Nevertheless, because we know that art not founded on memory is meaningless, we can legitimately hope to produce, from time to time, a poem, a painting or a building that will outlast its moment, pass on into the afterlife, into the memory of those yet to come. To do that, to send a message into the unknown future, we must be capable of receiving, responding to, the messages sent on into the once-future that is our living present. The more perfectly we give ourselves to the past, the more likely we are to transcend the present with a gesture that achieves the future. The more likely we are to understand what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he said: A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.
The proper foundation for all art is the study of what cultivates and enriches the heart.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, prose writer, editor and broadcaster. His most recent collection of poems, GREEK, has just been published by Dedalus Press. He is a member of Aosdana.
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Unfolding Ideas, Constructing the Site Research Centre, Community Hall and connecting landscape Roundstone, County Galway
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Colm Moore
Students Claire Chawke Alexander Creane Edin Gicevic Carla Hayes Ronan Kenny Elspeth Lee Stephen McNamara Eoin Murphy Luke O’Callaghan Cian Scanlon Patrick Stack Lena Steinbuch Amy Fitzgerald Piers Floyd Danielle Fox Dara Farrell Caroline Kennedy Joseph Mackey Martin Tiernan Aisling Walker
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Roundstone, Co. Galway Photo by Mac Jordan
(opposite) Site plan Edin Gicevic
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(opposite top left) Perspective drawing (opposite top right) Model (opposite bottom right) Section drawing (right) Plans Edin Gicevic
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Puppet Theatre
Exploration of the spatial possibilities of an empty building, or ‘container’ was carried out through the design of a puppet theatre, within an existing structure on Newmarket Square. The design was to be structurally independent of the walls, and a central consideration was how to light the space through the roof. An emphasis in the latter stages of project was on the description of materiality, atmosphere and design development.
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185 (above left & right) Model (opposite) Section Linda Prendergast
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(left)
(above)
Axonometric of Semi-Public Space
Tiered Interior Model
David Mulkeen
Cillian Brody
(opposite) Theatre Model Leisha McPartland
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Interior Perspective Drawings John Nolan
(opposite) Drawing – rendered section through auditorium
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Into Landscape A series of mystery tours
EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 2
Lectures 25th January 2010
Stories in a Landscape – Orla Murphy Shannonbridge 1810 – Mark Price 1st February 2010
Georgian Dublin: Landscapes of an absent point of view – Dr. Finola O’Kane I’m curious to know… – Chris Boyle 8th February 2010
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Gilles Clement – Desmond Byrne GAA Fields – Aoibheann Ni Mhearain 15th February 2010
Fínis Island – Merlo Kelly Landscape as experience in Antonioni’s ‘The Red Desert’ – Kevin Donovan 22nd February 2010
Krakatoa to Garnish Island – Dr. John Olley The ricer terraces of the Philippine Cordillera – Mary Laheen
Michael Pike Photo by Alice Clancy
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Over five consecutive Monday evenings, the ‘Into Landscape’ lecture series encompassed ten brief talks by members of staff, organised by Michael Pike. Chris Boyle Photo by Stephen Tierney
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Reflections on the Into Landscape Lecture Series Philip McGlade Year 3
their construction and maintenance, and how they convey prevalent attitudes towards landscape within Irish culture. Desmond Byrne gave an account of the work of Gilles Clement, looking at his studies on the rich potential of the ‘third landscape’, the leftover spaces of cities, of un-built sites, inaccessible or forgotten land, and rural space in-between industrialised, agricultural or forested territories. Orla Murphy talked about assimilation into her new home territory of County Mayo through the stories and the people of its landscape. Finola O’Kane discussed the beginnings of suburbia in Dublin, revealing how the suburban estate of Mount Merrion was formed by the Fitzwilliams and how it influenced later developments in the area. As wide-ranging as the content was, there were themes common to all of the lectures, and over the course of the series several key considerations about landscape were revealed. One central strand of discussion related to the landscape being in a constant state of change, often as the result of natural forces, like the rhythm of the seasons or erosion due to temperature, wind or rain. Tales of rivers shifting course along different path through the land, seas eroding inland whilst depositing and creating elsewhere, and of constant tectonic forces changing the mapped world were illustrative of ecological systems constantly rebalancing to change the appearance of the landscape, whether there is human interference or not.
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Intended to offer an insight into ways in which some school staff consider landscape, and to stimulate a wider discussion around this year’s theme of ‘Landscape and Economy,’ the lecture format allowed for a brief description of specific projects or aspects of a landscape that interested the speaker, followed by an open discussion arising from each. The resultant exploration of landscape was extremely varied. We learnt from Mark Price, through a brief history of warfare, how landscaped military defenses evolved from the geometries of the projectile, to produce the fort at Shannonbridge, Co. Offaly. Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin examined the typology of G.A.A. pitches around the country, their connection to community, the economy of
In addition to these natural changes there was much discussion of the mans’ direct actions and adjustments of landscape to suit different purposes, from erasing natural features to make the land fit to the orthogonal geometries of drawing and urban habitation, or mimicking and recreating the natural. In his talk on various artificial or altered landscapes, Chris Boyle described the landscape as, “a palimpsest… all landscapes are a series of layers… layers as being constructed… [which] constantly get exposed or built over or erased or renewed.” John Olley, in his talk, drew comparison between the island of Krakatoa after it was destroyed by volcanic eruption in 1883, and Garnish Island off the West Cork coast. At Krakatoa nature slowly built itself up again after the eruption destroyed all life on the island, with the biodiversity returning over time. This natural process, of a dead island regaining its life, was compared with the forced transformation of barren Garnish into a sub-tropical garden paradise through a series of man-made actions; “…However, most of [the] planting failed, because in Glengariff bay there is no shelter from wind and salt so nothing much could grow. So that barren island needed something else besides the hand of the architect. It needed perhaps the experience of living in a windswept environment. The first thing that had to be done was the planting of a shelter belt... the species were conifers, both
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salt and wind resistant. Immediately once you start to shelter an island you can start growing other things and as they grow as well the microclimate changes. The other problem with a barren island was the lack of soil. Initially they had to take a rather heavy hand and bring in much of the soil. Another problem is that of water, but that process of beginning to grow trees is the beginning of wisdom...the litter from the trees leads to the production of soil which will hold the moisture... this island gets transformed over time...” Parallel to the theme of an ever-changing landscape were discussions of the cultural landscape, formed and maintained according to the beliefs or practices of a particular culture. One example was illustrated by Mary Laheen’s portrayal of the rice terraces high in the mountain ranges of the Philippines. This distinctive landscape exists as a result of the symbiotic relationship of the remote tribal communities with their land. Their culture has evolved over time to work in harmony with their environment and maintain a delicately balanced ecosystem that allows them to thrive in challenging mountain terrain; “…Part of their customary law was a zoning system based on altitude, divided into strips. So each community had a strip of the mountain. At the top were tropical rain-forests, this area, human society could go up there to pick mushrooms and flowers or hunt but they were not allowed to cut
EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 2
trees. This top forest was protected by deities, other-world beings and soul-stealers... it would bring you bad fortune to cut the trees here, they were protecting the watershed and the soil by doing this, partly fighting against soil erosion... lower down in what they call a buffer zone was a clan forest that the community could use for building houses and firewood, but there were laws about replenishing that, so every time you cut down a tree it had to be replaced… around the settlements were green belts acting as a buffer to the terraces, where they grew citrus trees and vegetables...” As a culture changes, so do its actions upon the landscape; sometimes slowly, but often fervently and without due consideration of the processes, as was the case in Italy’s rapid industrialisation of the mid-twentieth century. Kevin Donovan examined the film ‘Il Deserto Rosso’ directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, which looked at this period of Italy’s swiftly changing, newly industrialised landscape. Kevin discussed how, following an accident, the main character finds herself at odds with her landscape, unable to connect or orientate herself; “... Juliana is often seen montaged onto the landscape. She appears as if she is on the landscape rather than in it, she is viewing it rather than operating within it. In such scenes this is because the industrial plant and this wide low landscape exists for her on an abstract level, she doesn’t really know what to make of it: its scale
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isn’t easily negotiable, it pre-exists her arrival in the place, it’s a hostile environment, it’s not of her making, it operates according to rules by which it’s difficult to live… it’s a fascinating but an uncomfortable place, and yet she has to inhabit it...so she inhabits the place by walking, and by walking, and walking, and walking, through this quasi-industrial, quasi-natural landscape. She is often seen from behind as if she is walking out into the world and one has the feeling from her movement in this film that sense is made of the world by walking into it, by carrying out the simplest physical practice one can, which is intuitive and largely unplanned... She often deviates from the planned paths of her environment, she moves out of the rudimentary place-making of the factory complex into the wilderness. It’s her way of appropriating the place, it gives rise to the possibility of connection between here and there...”
All of the ‘Into Landscape’ talks are available to view as videos in the library.
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Kevin Donovan Photo by Stephen Tierney
LANDSCAPE & CULTURE
MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2
Learning and Landscape
Tutors Will Dimond Eileen Fitzgerald Irene Kelly John Barry Lowe Deirdre McKenna Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin John Parker Emmett Scanlon
Students Suzanne Betts Darran Brennan Amy Bulman Moira Burke Jo Anne Butler Aidan Carty Dara Challoner Robert Coleman Patrick Conway Donal Crowe Alice Devenney Christina Devereaux Elaine Fanning Edward Feeney Denis Forrest Garrett Fullam Shane Garvey Seamus Guidera Sarah Halpenny
Nicole Hardy Lloyd Helen William Hutch Edwin Jebb Kathleen Kelly Vadim Kelly David Kennedy Tara Kennedy Shirley Kenny Neil Keogh Stephen Laverty Ciana March Helena McCarthy Caitriona McGilp Philip McGlade Kevin McGonigle Conor McGowan Jennifer McLoughlin David McMillan
Barbara McShane Caoimhe Merrick Cathal Monaghan Orla Monaghan Ronan O’Boyle Melanie O’Brien Aileen O’Connor Caitriona O’Connor Dawn Parke Daria Pietryka Sandra Plantos Dina Ryan Patrick Stokes-Kelly Shane Sugrue Shane Twohig Maarten van Dam Bróna Waldron Rebecca Wallace Adrian Wong
For the child, the school is the place of transition from the utterly subjective experience of infancy to the challenge of community. This place of learning occupies a territory somewhat between home and “the world”. It is in ways a domestic building type but for the child it represents “civitas”. The collective spaces of hallways, assembly and playground presage the public urban spaces of street, square and park. Through two separate briefs, two stages of education were explored, the first for a combined Pre-school and Primary School, the second brief for a Secondary School with combined Community Support Facilities. The project was supported by talks from Finola O’Kane Crimmins on ‘Traditions of Education in the Irish Landscape’, Sarah Sheridan on ‘Neutra and Schools’ and Sarah Mulrooney on ‘Educational Theory.’ As an introductory study, each student was asked to consider an essential idea about the learning environment in response to a selected text on education, and to imagine a place of learning by producing a scale model, independent of brief and site.
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197 Learning Landscape Model Dara Challoner
Individual and Community Territories Edwin Jebb
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2
198 (left) Classroom Study Model 1:20 David Kennedy
(opposite) Interim Group Reviews Photo by Alice Clancy
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200 (opposite) Strategic Site Model
Strategic Site Model
Interim Site Strategy Model
Alice Devenney
Seamus Guidera
Conor McGowan
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Inside/Outside
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Colm Moore
Students Paul Flynn Lisa O’Kane Jennifer O’Leary
This studio explores the relationship between inside and outside in its broadest sense. There are many potent structures in the Irish landscape that contain internal and external spaces; their boundaries may be walls, moats, level changes, hedges, cliffs. What they have in common is that the landscape is within the walls, part of the architectural project. Our students design proposals explore and investigate the nature of thresholds, enclosure, cover, screens, under and over, light and dark, views into and through spaces. Simple, ordinary buildings can be enhanced by intense and focused consideration of the nature and extent of the physical boundary between
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Plan of original courthouse illustrating extent of threshold with ground surface Group Study
outside and inside. Contingent spaces that exist in the in-between, where a person can pause without committing to entering or leaving, enrich experience. From the outset we limited our investigation to typical building programmes, with a focus on amplification and celebration of the everyday. The students undertook study trips to Classical Irish Courthouses. The work focused on the elaborate transitional space between forecourt and courtroom, composed of a series of external and internal public rooms within the public landscape of a town. Analytical drawings were made to study this extended threshold and the nature of the resultant spaces. Following this study, with its focus on the role of institutional buildings within the fabric of the community, the group made the decision to undertake the study and design of school buildings. Collective investigation of personally chosen precedents were made and assessed within agreed parameters and by particular comparison with the Department of Education design guidelines. The individual character of the chosen landscape for each project provides a means of developing the study’s conclusions. All of the work concentrates on character and atmosphere to define a sense of interior or exterior; an enclosed space may feel as if it’s outside, a courtyard can be a room. A place for learning may be beneath a tree, a landscape extend into a classroom.
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Section of precedent study – Strawberry Vale Pre-School, British Columbia by Patkau Architects – to show relationship of classroom to raised landscape outside Group Study
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Site drawing at interim stage in context of Ratoath Jennifer O’Leary
204 Jennifer O’Leary is designing a 16 class primary school on a site in the rapidly expanding town of Ratoath. She is working with historic and contemporary context to make a community building designed as a series of courtyards utilising sophisticated concepts of public, shared and private outdoor space.
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205 An existing stable yard within the romantic landscaped demesne of Castledawson House provides the starting point for Lisa O’Kane’s ‘integrated’ school. The design explores social integration as well as the integration of old and new buildings and broader landscape elements.
Model of Moyola Park School and interim stage scheme Lisa O’Kane
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Paul Flynn is designing an Irish language boarding school in Ring, Co. Waterford, which
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is also a community and cultural amenity for Irish music. His design deals with the relationship between living and learning; he uses outdoor and transitional spaces at different levels to explore this in plan and section.
1:100 Study model of a Classroom Paul Flynn
(opposite) Upper School Table Review Photo by Stephen Tierney
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LANDSCAPE
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& DWELLING High Great Chamber, Hardwick Hall Photo courtesy of the National Trust
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A living plan of rooms On revisiting Hardwick Hall Stephen Bates
ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
Our everyday world is a world of rooms. In those rooms is space and in that space lives life.1
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Stephen Bates Photo by Alice Clancy
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Moving through the rooms of the grand house of Hardwick Hall guided by stewards and ropes, walking around and between seemingly fixed-inplace furniture and empty rooms in respectfully hushed voice one becomes sensitive to the phases of each room’s life through use, of the effect of time and occupation and of a palpable sense of personal character and cultural conventions. One becomes aware that these spaces have lives. Visiting them long after their original purpose has become obsolete, the atmosphere remains charged with the traces of past occupation. In 1600 between sixty and ninety people resided at Hardwick Hall, conducting a ritualised daily routine in an atmosphere of hustle and bustle. Organised like a court with Bess of Hardwick at the centre, her own immediate family, the upper servants, and the lower servants, radiated from her in concentric circles. Men did most of the work as servants The house was lit by candles. Water was carried through the rooms in jugs, as there was no running water. Away from the proximity of fireplaces rooms were cold, with two or three layers of curtains against windows and drapes over doors. By day, many of the rooms would have been noisy, with an animated and convivial central Great Hall, a multi-purpose room used by the lower servants to dine in, play cards and spend their non working time. At night, the same servants would bed down on landings of the main staircase, outside
bedchambers, on pallets with straw mattresses pulled out from under the master’s or mistress’s bed, in the scullery, off the pantry and hall. Family and servants of each tier were tied with a bond which, though hierarchical, was rooted in mutual care, commitment to the household and perhaps even love. The matrix of connected rooms, with an emphasis on a middle room, was a typical household space arrangement in Europe at the time, providing constant interaction and proximity between those who served and those served. Privacy was achieved by layered thresholds from public room to private chamber. In houses like Hardwick, the plan represents a way of life: they were not divided according to function but according to status, with increasingly ceremonial rooms on each floor. The design of the plan and facades has been attributed to Robert Smythson (1535–1614). He was a stone mason by trade, but by the time he was thirty years old he had become a master mason familiar with the classical orders and inspired by Italian architects such as Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, with their interest in symmetry, ‘through halls’ and a compactness in internal planning. Smythson had assisted in the remodelling of Longleat House (1554–1580) and went on to author the designs at Wollaton Hall (1580–88) and Worksop Manor (1585). ‘Architect’ and ‘architecture’
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were not yet words in the Elizabethan period, and the development of design was a collaborative enterprise between client, qualified craftsmen and labourers. This may explain the unique and seemingly contradictory aspects of the house, with formal exploration of symmetry, huge expanses of glass and ‘devices’ often at odds with the idiosyncratic accommodation of the needs of rooms and people . The results are often spectacular, through the mismatch between the outside and the inside and the rich disorientation of the interior. Behind the uniform facade, symmetrical on all four sides with a basic rectangular structure surrounded by six towers, lies a spatial plan of rooms with a great variety of sizes and volumes, ranging from the intimate closet to the majestic Long Gallery. At the centre of the plan, and the point of entry, is the Great Hall. This is understood to be the first example of a cross hall, which broke with medieval tradition by being placed symmetrically in the centre of the house and at right angles to the main front. The adjustment is thought to have derived from Smythson’s earlier designs for much smaller hunting lodges, but the colonnades placed between towers at the back and front suggests the influence of the plan of Palladio’s Villa Valmarana in Lisiera. It also demonstrates the declining role of the Great Hall in Elizabethan houses, once the ceremonial heart of the formal home, now a large
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entrance hall through which the visitor would be led to the main stairs as part of a formal promenade through the house. The stair itself embodies the picturesque potential so fully exploited in English architecture and is experienced as a beautiful sequence of spaces. The stone steps are broad and rise through compressed, tall spaces with straight, tapered flights, changing direction and re-orientating the visitor until they arrive at a small vestibule at second floor level, which opens onto the High Great Chamber. In 1600, the stair space, now lined with Flemish tapestries, would have been bare and sparse except for beds, forms and tables on the landings for waiting and sleeping servants (although the beds would have been turned up to be concealed during the day). The second floor contained the state rooms laid out in a sequence appropriate to a royal palace. Indeed, it is generally recognised that Bess sought to establish a regal residence either to entertain the travelling Queen Elizabeth I (who never visited), to accommodate Queen Mary of Scots (who never resided there) or to provide for the needs of a potential queen (her daughter Arabella, who never became queen). The sequence followed the tradition of progressively more private spaces, from a public to a more private chamber, to the bedchamber to which intimates only would have had access, with adjoining closets and a back stairs
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allowing servants to move rapidly between floors. The ceremonial pivot was the High Great Chamber, a reception room equivalent in volume to a modernday five-bedroom house. The Great Chamber was used for receiving, entertaining, dancing, music-making, performing masques and plays. Its principal use was for dinner, and meals here would have been served with great ceremony, with food carried up from the ground floor kitchen. The proportions of this room were in part set by the need to accommodate two sets of Flemish tapestries bought by Bess four year before construction commenced on the house. The tapestries cover the wall space exactly between the skirting and the frieze. A low door positioned discreetly behind the raised receiving chair, in the corner of the room, connects to the Withdrawing Chamber, which is in turn connected to the Best Bedchamber via another door in the diagonally opposite corner. Pre-dating the enfilade, which sought an axial arrangement of doorways connecting a suite or rooms with a continuous vista, this arrangement of connected spaces is more discontinuous and elaborate than those that will later follow. It seems to emphasise the marking of individual territory and character to each space and creates a labyrinthine matrix of spaces which brings a degree of surprise and drama to the experience of moving through.
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(above) Stone Staircase Photo courtesy of the National Trust
(opposite) Exterior, Hardwick Hall Photo by Stephen Bates
This is felt most acutely as one enters the Long Gallery, through the second low door in the Great High Chamber. This door is half screened by a tapestry, which loops over the top of the door in such a way as to require the visitor to stoop and dip their head as they pass, entering from the corner at one end. This room, primarily used for exercise in winter and in bad weather, is the most dramatic of volumes at Hardwick, filling the whole eastern half of the house at this level and measuring fifty one metres in length, eight metres in height and varying between seven and twelve metres in width. The room is dominated by a ceiling of ornamental plasterwork in a pattern of circular ribs, painted white. Plastered ceilings became characteristic of Elizabethan interiors as an alternative to the open timber roofs in the tradition of Medieval halls and were established by French ĂŠmigrĂŠ plasterers who imported the soft, slow-setting lime plasterwork technique, moulded not by hand but repetitively in wooden moulds. Despite its size, the Gallery has a soft acoustic, due to the wall tapestries and rush matting. Regularly watered, as it became brittle when dry, the matting gave a rustic smell to the room, and together with the mustiness of the faded tapestries this gives the modern-day visitor a strong impression of time standing still. There is a stillness in this space, as if the protagonists of this communal room had left momentarily and not
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ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
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Hardwick Hall, Ground Floor Plan Stephen Bates
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Hardwick Hall, Long Section Stephen Bates
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ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
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come back. The visitor encounters the space as if finding chairs pushed away from a table, indicating a gathering just missed and leaving a sense of a moment just passed. It is not possible to disengage these powerful spaces with the equally strong personality of their owner, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. The Hardwick family were minor gentry established at Hardwick for at least six generations. Having been born at the Old Hall on the estate around 1527, Bess was to control the estate by 1583 when she was in her mid 50s. Having risen through the ranks from gentlewoman or upper servant, through four marriages she became a businesswoman, landowner, collector of wealth and a loyal, yet ambitious follower of the sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I. Her fourth marriage was to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury in 1567, when she was forty years old. The Earl of Shrewsbury was promoted to a high position at Elizabeth’s court and given the task of custodian to Mary Queen of Scots from 1569 to1584, and this significantly increased Bess’s social standing in both the royal court and her home county. This period coincided with the length of her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury, which collapsed in the same year as Mary was finally executed. It was in the same year as the death of her then estranged husband in 1590 that she began construction of the new hall
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at Hardwick. The guest walking across the lead roof on fine days or warm nights, from the stair in one tower to the banqueting room (to take sweet meats after dinner) in the opposite tower, surveying the expanse of the Derbyshire landscape, would not have been unaware of the power of this formidable octogenarian. Bess’s identity is graphically reinforced through the strapwork initials placed under a coronet in silhouette on the parapets of the six towers. The towers assume an endless variety of groupings according to the angle from which they are seen. Their placement away from the corners led to striking effects of stepping and recession, the effects of which were perhaps inspired by the new science of perspective emerging at the time which began to change the way composition was considered. The four-way symmetry of the facades is emphasised by the classical entablatures which run all around the house between each storey. The height of these storeys progressively increases in a kind of ‘upside-down’ classical order, their differences marking the social importance of their function. The tall windows, however, owe nothing to the architecture of Italy as their extruded proportions hint at influences from Flanders. The windows define the character to the house, through the dematerialisation of the facade and the shimmering visual effect of the multiple cast glass plates held lightly within a fine lead net.
It is the contradiction inherent between the appearance of consistency given by the repeated rhythm of windows and the experience of rich volumetric variety of the interior that becomes an education to the modern-day visitor, provocatively challenging the conventions of 20th century Modernism. Some of the windows are completely false and have chimney flues behind them. In other cases what seems to be one window on the exterior conceals two storeys. The result is a complex entity that seems to extend beyond the limits of architecture into the world of ideas of those who initiated its realisation and whose voices one can still sense within its empty rooms.
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1 Emmett Scanlon, ‘A View with a Room’, in The Lives of Spaces, 2008
Stephen Bates graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1989 and gained professional experience in London and Barcelona prior to establishing Sergison Bates architects in 1996. He has taught at a number of schools of architecture, including the Architectural Association in London, and was Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He is
(opposite)
currently Professor of Urbanism and Housing at
Rooftop Banqueting Room
the Technische Universität in Munich. In addition
Photo courtesy of the National Trust
to his academic commitments, he lectures extensively both in the UK and abroad and writes regularly on architecture. Since 2005 he has also been a member of the Arts Enabling Group of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), London.
LANDSCAPE & DWELLING
EVENTS / EXHIBITION / SEMESTER 2
Atlas of Cavan Exhibition From 1st February 2010 Red Room
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This exhibition was first shown in the Johnston Central Library in Cavan town in November 2008. The work is the result of a year’s architecture residency by Orla Murphy and Dermot McCabe who were invited by Cavan County Council to research and respond to the theme of Cavan Re-Imagined. The process of examining the town through fieldwork and collaboration with students of St Patrick’s Secondary School revealed 17 laneways, which thread between the town’s two main streets, trapping space with potential for civic inhabitation. Rather than proposing specific intervention in these spaces the exhibition aims to suggest to the viewer how urban space may be adaptable to change. A hand-made Atlas is the focus of the exhibition. The Atlas maps the present laneway spaces and, in a play on children’s cut-and-stick games, invites the reader to make and imagine their own Cavan. Special thanks to Rhonda Tidy of the Cavan Arts Office, Leon Lynch of St Patrick’s College Cavan and to Lisa Cassidy who collaborated on the project.
Sponsors Cavan County Council Arts Office, Arts Council, NRA, Simon J Kelly + Partners Architects
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(opposite) Laneways model (left) Atlas of Cavan Photos by Conor McKeown
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Housing Design Cavan, County Cavan Site Visits 28th & 29th January 2010
Focusing on one of three sites of varying conditions, the class examined how best each could be inhabited. How could an intervention create a place that is great to live in? How can housing reinforce a sense of place, a connection to the community and a relationship with the wider context? Each student was asked to examine how residential units could be flexible and adaptable to accommodate different occupants with varied working, living and social demands for the period of their lifetime. An analysis of the broad and complex considerations within housing were carefully distilled to inform the design project. Prevalent issues included daylight, privacy, relationship of internal to external space, semi-external space, threshold, repetition, variance, mix of dwelling types and sizes, mix of other uses, topography, scale, grain, unity‌ Sites selected were all within existing back-lands of Cavan town.
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(right) On-site surveying, Cavan (opposite) Round table reviews Photos by Alice Clancy
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
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(above) Cavan Site Drawing Don Holohan
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 1
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225 (previous spread, opposite & left) Typological Approaches to Site, Interim Stage Collective Work Photos by Alice Clancy
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Brief Utopia Tim Robinson
TEXT / TIM ROBINSON
The people who figure in architects’ illustrations are a favoured subspecies of the human race. They do not suffer from thick waists or round shoulders, they do not grow old, their children commit no vandalism. They stroll through sunlit plazas enjoying retail opportunities and socializing with their like. They relax by cooling water-features. In their spacious homes they rarely exert themselves to do more than stand elegantly and sip wine. Some anthropologist should write them up.
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M and I recently had the privilege of joining their number. Sheila O’Donnell and Colm Moore gave their UCD students an essay of mine on our house in Roundstone and asked them to draw or model it on the basis of my words and their own imaginations. The results were surprising; imagination won out over my topological precisions. I had mentioned the number of reflections that illuminate the building, which has many windows and glass screens and overhangs the sea. The students’ versions were multidimensional palaces built for reflections. Somewhere they had read that I once studied mathematics, back in the Stone Age. Our house became a mathematician’s necromantic cell. A second part of their project was to make an accurate record of the house and its garden. All day, as M read in her room and I pecked at my keyboard in mine, they tiptoed about us, measuring, sketching and photographing. We began to feel transparent, nonentical. Or we were being transformed into members of the superior class of beings described above – inadequate specimens, but still with a touch of their ethereal glamour. The magic has since worn off, alas. Features of the building I had not mentioned reassert their primacy: its dampproblem and its spider population. But it was a day of transcendence for us and for the house.
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House for a Mathematician Edin Gicevic
LANDSCAPE & DWELLING
LECTURES / SEMESTER 1
Aurelio Galfetti
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Works illustrated by
(opposite)
Aurelio Galfetti, Red Room
Dwelling in Greece
Photo by Alice Clancy
Aurelio Galfetti
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FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
Technology Programme
The first year Architectural Technology programme consists of three linked elements; technology studio, the lecture series and a research project. The emphasis is on giving first year students a good foundation of knowledge in building materials, construction techniques and the processes of construction. We concentrate on the domestic scale to explain the link between the design process and decisions relating to construction itself. The programme is supported by hands-on demonstrations, exercises in the building laboratory and site visits. The lecture course focuses on the principles of building; examples are drawn from high quality contemporary architecture. The technology project promotes the individual observation and analysis of an existing building, in order to reinforce an understanding of the links between the final built work and the material and processes employed. Both the technology and design studio programmes are closely linked to ensure that technology is seen as integral to the design process.
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Wall Section Linda Prendergast
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As part of the first year lecture series on contemporary approaches to building technology, Cian Deegan of TAKA architects gave a workshop on the construction and detailing of their Brick House. Students subsequently completed wall studies based on principles of brick construction.
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TAKA was founded by Alice Casey and Cian Deegan in 2006. Alice and Cian both graduated from Dublin Institute of Technology in 2003. Alice has worked with Curtis Wood Architects and dePaor Architects, Cian has worked with Niall McLaughlin Architects and O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects. In 2008 TAKA became the youngest ever representatives of Ireland at the Venice Architectural Biennale as part of The Lives of Spaces exhibition. TAKA will co-curate the 2010 Irish Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architectural Biennale. Both Alice and Cian have been studio tutors at the UCD School of Architecture and Queens University Belfast.
Brick House, Dublin by TAKA Architects Photo by Alice Clancy
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FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
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(left) Victorian Flemish Bond (above) ‘Separated’ Flemish Bond TAKA
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Clontra Survey
Students undertook a comprehensive survey of Clontra House, Shankill, County Dublin. Designed by Deane and Woodward Architects the house was completed in 1860. On-site measurement, drawn and photographic documentation led to the production of a series of measured drawings which explored all aspects of the house, from construction details to the relationship to the exterior and gardens.
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Window in Plan and Elevation Robert Curley
LANDSCAPE & DWELLING
FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 2
234 (right) Plan of Entrance Hall, Clontra House John Nolan
(opposite) Section through Threshold, Clontra House Michelle Murphy
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Courtlife
Tutors Michael Pike Simon Walker
Students James Casey Caroline Kennedy Aisling Walker
Courtyards are an ancient spatial configuration, occurring in distinctive form in many regions of the world. This generic type of planning has retained its relevance by offering the possibility of dense urbanization and maximum land use, at the same time ensuring a direct contact with the two natural elements – earth beneath and sky above. The work of the group has focused on the search for new urban forms for the extension and consolidation of Irish towns based on the courtyard. These are deliberate counter-points to the omnipresent free-standing apartment blocks and scattered suburban houses that have come to surround almost every town in the country in the last ten years. Through the use of alternate covered rooms and rooms open to the sky these proposed settlements can be conceived as porous solids rather than compositions of individual blocks, allowing for deeper and more elaborate plan forms. The three students have selected towns of a similar scale in the environs of Dublin: Trim, Monasterevin and Rush. They have also chosen to work on the same brief: 20 dwellings and a combination of related community or work spaces. From this common base, however, the three approaches are very distinct.
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James Casey is working in the backlands of Trim and is concerned with the making of a more complex interwoven townscape that leads from the street edge through a sequence of courtyards to a common landscape beyond. The section is exploited to allow for large workspaces at ground level, with a series of dwellings held above a common access on the roof of the workshops. The courtyard becomes the device that unites these functions and levels.
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Trim Plan & Model James Casey
LANDSCAPE & DWELLING
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Caroline Kennedy has been studying monasteries and is using this model to make a new form of community in Monasterevin, bringing farmers back into the town and organizing a series of dwellings and communal spaces around a sequence of courtyards. An existing mill building is re-used and forms the first episode in the spatial sequence. The courts become progressively more private as they move from a relationship to the town to a more direct connection with the wider landscape.
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Mill Entrance Caroline Kennedy
(opposite) Rush Plan & Model Aisling Walker
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Aisling Walker is working with the vast greenhouse structures of Rush and seeking a new form of occupation that combines living and growing within a single organism, an interlocking of house and greenhouse that is mutually beneficial to both. The housing therefore becomes an inhabited boundary to the greenhouses, forming courtyards that give scale to the huge structure, taking heat while providing a buffer.
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LANDSCAPE
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& MEMORY Cemetery, St Mullins, Co. Carlow Photo by Stephen Tierney
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY
INTERVIEW / KENNETH FRAMPTON
Kenneth Frampton Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
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Kenneth Frampton visited UCD on 4th and 5th March 2010, as a guest critic for the fifth year interim reviews, delivering a lecture to the School on 4th March. The following interview was conducted on the morning of 5th March.
Kenneth Frampton Photo by Stephen Tierney
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Lisa Cassidy: We had a lecture series over the past semester where members of staff presented on a landscape that interested them, whether it was a particular place or theme. One thing that arose was that it seemed to be very difficult for us to define landscape, while with the urban, nobody had any difficulty, but here landscape could be wilderness, or manmade, or the city, or...everything. Do you think the difficulty with defining landscape is representative of an issue for architecture? Kenneth Frampton: Well, I don’t think it necessarily has to be an issue. One could use the word topography, and when in the last edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, I thought I needed a series of categories in order to make sense of the recent past within the terms of the book. It begins with topography, morphology, sustainability and materiality. I used the word topography in order to refer to a landscape approach, to either building or to landscape or the two together, so I think you can in a sense overcome this dilemma by using the word topography. LC: You have referred to Siza describing the architect being specialised at non-specialisation, and the questions at the end of your lecture included discussion of education in Catalunya, with the landscape architect coming through architecture. Do you think this model is a good one? Is the architect’s
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role to be working with the landscape specialist, or to be engaging directly with the landscape themselves, or should it be integral, or...? KF: I’m not entirely sure about this, but I think that until very recently, there was no profession of landscape architect in Spain, so architects were in the habit of designing landscape. I remember many years ago, for reasons I can’t really explain, we used to have – and we do again now, but there was a period when we used to have a lot of students from Catalunya. I can remember in those days, for whatever reason, we looked at the portfolios of these applications before they came to the school – I’m not involved in that activity any more – but I noticed to my surprise that a lot of these portfolios contained projects that were really landscape projects, and that impressed me a lot. I think that in Spain there is a very strong sense of the importance of the ground, and I think that’s part of the story. LC: I wanted to ask you about [the Lovell Beach House]. With regard to landscape, you have written on the early 20th century in Los Angeles – Irving Gill, Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler, Neutra, the Usonian tradition – and the notion of the early precedent for bioclimatically responsive design. Do you think that we can still learn from that?
INTERVIEW / KENNETH FRAMPTON
KF: Yes. I mean, I think the figure that really stands out in all of this, in the sense that his concepts about landscape are more generalised in some sense, but also very precisely detailed, is Neutra. I think that Neutra’s attitude to garden design and landscape in relation to his work remains a model, and his drawings are particularly sensitive, his plans and his understanding of plant material. [...] There was always a particular landscape architect who worked with Neutra, a woman. and we do know that Neutra spent a year working with the Swiss landscape architect Gustav Ammann, so I think he was extremely sensitive to plant material and had a knowledge of plant material, more than Schindler, or Wright for that matter, because I think Wright always worked with landscape designers – Jens Jensen, for example, [...] a Chicago landscape architect.
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LC: I was interested when you were talking yesterday about the need for cultural research within architecture: “We talk about the global, but there’s all sorts of work done all over the world. Differences have been made or are being made, and we don’t know about them. [...] Even though we use this word ‘research’, and even though the university breathes down one’s neck with regard to doing hard enough research, their idea of research is techno-scientific, empirical, but there’s another kind – cultural, political research, which we don’t do very well, and if only we could improve on that,
it would be encouraging.” Would you see that being an interdisciplinary approach, or how would you imagine it working? KF: Well, I suppose it is interdisciplinary, but what I really have in mind is, I made this comment about Curitiba, but one could also say – not here maybe, but for elsewhere – Temple Bar, you know, that the story of Temple Bar and exactly who was involved in this, who were the prime movers in Temple Bar, what was the history of its development and what was involved in making this development successful. On a much larger scale, I think this is true of Curitiba. We do know that Jaime Lerner was the mayor of Curitiba for fifteen years, but we don’t know all the details of Curitiba and what was involved. And then there are other examples, such as [Enrique Penalosa and Antanas Mockus Sivickas], these two were successively mayors of Bogota, and they imported ideas from Curitiba into Bogota, and the centre of Bogota has been transformed, with bicycle ways and walkways and this transmillennial public transport that was modelled on the Curitiba service of public transport. So, the story of Bogota and Curitiba, for example, I think our knowledge of all of that, that kind of research is amazing because it would enable one to understand the political, the economic, the context that brings that kind of
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work into existence, so it would in that sense be interdisciplinary but doing the work at all would mean to talk to different actors.
of departure for thinking about a particular project, and I think that’s a slightly fragile... I was quite surprised by that.
LC: Finally, has anything in particular arisen in your first day of the Fifth Year review that’s struck you about the school or about the individual work?
LC: Would that be any different in Columbia?
KF: Coming from New York, and from Columbia, which is a school that is totally dominated by digital – I mean, nobody draws by hand anymore in Columbia, and in fact students are beginning to lack the capacity to draw by hand, and I think that’s a very disturbing development because the relationship between the hand and the head, this capacity to conceive an idea through sketching, this is a real loss not having that anymore. It’s very present here, of course – there is still hand-drawing and very much so, and that is very important and very impressive. This preoccupation with landscape in this particular studio is also equally important, and that’s, generally speaking, underemphasised in schooling in the States. The one thing I’m slightly critical of, and in some ways I’m very surprised by, is... I think there are, and in fact I’m sure there are very good teachers of history and theory in this school, but there’s a kind of schism which I think happens between the design studio and the theoretical courses. There’s a tendency for the students not to use historical precedent as a point
KF: No, it wouldn’t be, it’s an issue there as well, but I’m surprised in the context of this continuation of a very strong craft, drawing, hand-drawn ethos that’s in this school, I’m very surprised that the question of historical precedent is not more active in the thinking. I mean, we do teach history and theory at Columbia, and there’s also a thing there, somehow or other, I think it’s more understandable due to the emphasis on digital.
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Kenneth Frampton studied architecture at Guildford School of Art and the Architectural Association. In addition to working in practice in Israel and the UK, Frampton was technical editor of Architectural Design from 1962–5. Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York, and has taught at many other schools including the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, Princeton University, the Bartlett School of Architecture. Kenneth Frampton has written extensively on architecture, with publications including Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, and Labour, Work and Architecture.
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Landscape and Archive St Mullins Heritage Centre St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Peter Cody Chris Boyle Collaborators Bridie Lawlor Mary O’Neill
Students Timothy Brick Lisa Cassidy Sean Finegan Sorcha Kenneally Patrick McGrath Conor Morrissey Kieran Murray Orla Philips Sarah Prendergast Emilie Rigal Paul Seagault
The students undertook the design and construction of a new exhibition to rehouse an existing collection of artefacts. The exhibition is structured around ten separate story lines supported by a documented recording of local history from the 1938 schools project.
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(above) Exhibition structure drawing Group work
(opposite) Display structure assembled in church Photo by Lisa Cassidy
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
(left)
(opposite)
Assembling display structure in workshop
Year 4 Interim Review with Jan
Photo by Lisa Cassidy
Olav Jensen and John Tuomey Photo by Stephen Tierney
(right) Painting interior of 1811 church St Mullins Photo by Peter Cody
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ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
We tend to think of death as something finite, and to some extent it is, for it marks the incontrovertible end-point of someone’s mortal existence. But death also belongs to a process that is ongoing and without limits. It is inextricably linked to the cycles of regeneration and rebirth. Tumuli – ancient burial mounds – embody this condition in an unambiguous and yet remarkably profound way.
A Landscape of Eternal Dwelling Samantha Martin-McAuliffe
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Fig. 1 View from the tumulus towards the river valley and the western ridge.
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A burial mound is in the first instance a tomb, the final and hopefully permanent resting place for one or more individuals. Simultaneously it is also intrinsic to – literally ingrained within – the surrounding and ever changing landscape. How do we reconcile and make sense of this dichotomy between immutability and transformation? Generally, within the study of burial tumuli, the dead command most of our attention. The following essay explores as well as underscores the significance of the deceased, however, it will ultimately show that in tumuli the dead are principally important because their presence serves the living.1 The Lofkënd Archaeological Project in Albania Between 2007 and 2009 I participated in the Lofkënd Archaeological Project, the excavation of a prehistoric burial tumulus in Albania. The excavation was organised and run by a joint team from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Archaeology, Tirana, from 2004 to 2007. In total, the project uncovered in 85 graves
1 A longer discussion of this analysis is forthcoming in the final publication of the Lofkënd Archaeological Project (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2010, edited by John K. Papadopoulos, Sarah Morris, and Lorenc Bejko).
of the Late Bronze through Early Iron Ages, as well as 15 burials of humans and animals dating from recent Ottoman times (Papadopoulos et al. 2007). The tumulus at Lofkënd stands on a foothill that is ancillary to a large ridge of the Mallakastra Hills in western Albania. Extending in a south-westerly direction, the hill of the burial tumulus looks toward the valley of the Gjanicë River, which runs further to the south-west (fig. 1). Immediately beyond the river rises yet another imposing ridge stretching northwest-southeast. The view from the tumulus and the view towards it can change significantly depending on the place of observation. At times the tumulus appears to jut forth impressively from an uneven bluff, such as when it is viewed from the modern village to the immediate southeast (fig. 2). In contrast, when seen from the site of another burial tumulus, that of Mashkullora in the northwest, the Lofkënd tumulus takes the appearance of a protuberance growing atop a moderate incline (fig. 3). The varying perspectives onto the tumulus are important to consider not only because they ask us to question how the mound was seen in antiquity, but also because they remind us that the situation of this burial site is never part of a single, framed landscape; it can be understood from many perspectives. As we shall see, these
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perspectives are both literal and figurative. It is also worthwhile mentioning that following the excavation the tumulus was rebuilt in its original location, and all of the photographs included in this essay show the mound in its reconstructed state. Although the excavation of the Lofkënd tumulus has revealed a wealth of material finds, the identities of the entombed as well those responsible for the construction of the mound remain unobtainable at this point. We do know, however, that the tumulus was not built at once, but rather grew through accretion over an exceptionally long time period. Beyond this, other studies belonging to the archaeological project have suggested that the wider vicinity of the tumulus has been a site of human occupation for millennia. This situation raises many questions, both practical and philosophical: What did the tumulus represent for those groups or communities who used the land around it? Why was it used by successive generations? How might we understand it as a monument? What does it suggest about the thresholds and limits of time? A close reading of the tumulus within its setting can address all of these questions as well as reveal important clues about the wider significance of burial tumuli in general.
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ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
Marking the Land The burial tumulus at Lofkënd is essentially an intervention, something that is fabricated by the human hand and imposed onto the landscape. Its placement establishes orientation because it is perceived as a fixed topographic marker. And yet it is not something that necessarily delimits or circumscribes physical boundaries. Instead, we can understand it as an object that radiates influence. Rather than physically changing the ground on which it stands, the mound changes our interpretation and perception of the surrounding land (Papadopoulos 2006:83; see also Barrett 1999:256; Thomas 1991:30). This situation is crucial and can be comprehended more fully by looking beyond Lofkënd. Scholars working outside of archaeology have also commented on how inanimate objects may claim dominion over a locale and establish place (Tuan 1977:162; Harrison 2003:19) More than once, Wallace Stevens’ poem Anecdote of the Jar has been used to illustrate this phenomenon (Stevens 2006:66–67). It is worthwhile quoting a stanza from the poem in order to clarify how it relates to our present discussion: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
252 Fig. 2 View toward the tumulus from a village situated in the immediate southeast.
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The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes that the jar, like a sculpture, can in certain circumstances transcend its inanimate condition and “incarnate personhood” (Tuan 1977:162). The jar is lifeless and yet it is precisely this quality that transforms it into a “metaphor for human striving” (Tuan 1971:184). It becomes a representation, a symbol for the determination of an individual or a community to create place and establish authority over a particular locale. We can understand the jar in Steven’s poem as analogous to the burial tumulus at Lofkënd in two different yet connected ways. First of all, the mound has the capacity to lend tangibility to ephemeral things, such as identity. Because it was intentionally built by human hands it acts as a kind of shorthand for inhabitation in general. As such, it can be seen as a form of architecture that “localizes caring” for the land and permanently represents or refers those who dwelled in the vicinity of the tumulus over long periods of time (Casey 1993:175). Beyond this, the tumulus it is everlasting, or it at least transcends the finitude of those responsible for its construction. This suggests that it consecrates not only place, but also time. Ultimately, however, we must consider how the situation at Lofkënd is a great deal more complex than Stevens’ jar and Tennesseean hill. Far from being an empty vessel, or even an earthen sculpture, the burial tumulus is a receptacle for the dead.
Tumulus as Repository The Lofkënd tumulus is first and foremost a monument to the deceased. Tombs, graves and memorials to the dead are cultural universals. Because they are profound and yet a basic aspect of every community, they are also understood to be common. The tradition implied by graves means that they are typical, and perhaps this is why their deep-seated messages and contributions are frequently overlooked. In a very literal way, a marked burial serves the dead precisely because it is a receptacle for their remains. That these containers promised accommodation – a home – for the dead is attested by the earliest cultures (Colvin 1992). Apart from being a dwelling, a grave is commonly seen as a mark of respect, for the dead deserve an honorable burial. These conditions both focus on how graves serve the dead; what they offer those who have passed. They are undeniably important, but the gravity of their reverence can divert our attention away from exploring how graves can serve us, the living. We have no evidence to suggest that people died at the Lofkënd burial tumulus, and thus it is unlikely that this place marks profound – or even particular – moments in people’s lives. A more plausible hypothesis is that people were interred at Lofkënd as a kind of memorial, a remembrance of the past that specifically benefited the living. Burial
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tumuli, like monumental tombs, are purposefully visible for our sake, not for the sake of the dead. It is worthwhile mentioning that the Greek word for grave, sema, is also translated as sign (Harrison 2003:20; Thomas 2007:166). A grave must be visible so that the living may recognize it. As David Lowenthal has pointed out, although memorials refer to those who lay beneath them, “the marking function is no longer consequential once bodies have moldered into dust or have been removed to make way for others…Cemeteries matter less as repositories for the dead than as fields of remembrance for the living; the unmarked grave goes unseen” (Lowenthal 1979:123). However much the tumulus builders may have perceived their act as a form of respect for their ancestors, the mound ultimately provided solace and reassurance for those who survived. Because it is deliberately visible and durable, the burial mound embodies a twofold promise: It ensures that the living would have a place to recall their ancestors, a kind of aide-memoire that could trigger recollection. Its physical presence guarantees that the living could connect with their forebears in a tangible way. Furthermore, the monumentality of the burial imparts permanency, suggesting that the memories of the dead could be retrieved not merely in the immediate aftermath of interment, but also in perpetuity (Bradley 1985:9; Harrison 2003:39). As a veritable “mound
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of memory”, the tumulus contained the literal and metaphorical roots of the community, or communities, who used it (Papadopoulos 2006). In a way, the dead, although silent and inanimate, are a kind of community. Unlike the living, however, they have a remarkable staying power. Notably, the tumulus does not preserve the past itself, but what the past stood for – a particular social collective (Lowenthal 1979:121). In other words, the dead provide reassurance. By dwelling perpetually in a singular place they assert continuity (Harries 1998:310). If this tumulus at Lofkënd marks a territory that was once controlled by a specific community, then the presence of ancestors attests to that claim. Most importantly, the dead transcend the restrictions that inevitably challenge the living. Because their presence is not finite, they effectively promise to inhabit and oversee the land forevermore. The dead, as Robert Harrison has argued, can assert extraordinary authority over the land: “The surest way to take possession of a place and secure it as one’s own is to bury one’s dead in it” (Harrison 2003:24). We may refer to the tumulus at Lofkënd as a gravesite, but it is not simply an area of land, a plot set aside for the deceased. The fundamental and lasting value of this place is wholly contingent upon its exterior appearance. In contrast to the hill on which it stands, the burial swells and bulges, projecting upward and outward from a slope. The
ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
profile of the mound immediately suggests its role as a kind of vessel, and although it is essentially composed of natural material, its shape discloses that it is man-made. It is exactly this juxtaposition of contours that draws attention to the tumulus and signals its presence, thereby communicating to us that it is architecture. Adolph Loos observed this elemental condition of building and making when he remarked that “[i]f we find a mound in the forest, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped up with a spade in the shape of a pyramid, then we become solemn and something tells us: somebody lies buried here – this is architecture!” (quoted in Harries 1998:292). Loos’ comment underscores the importance of deliberate construction in our interpretation of architecture. The tumulus at Lofkënd may outwardly look very different from a mausoleum composed of cut-stone, yet both are intentional repositories for the dead; neither expresses this essential quality more than the other.
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Afterlife Like any monumental tomb, the Lofkënd tumulus possesses the capacity to link the living with previous generations. But it is also important to think about how the mound is a place attuned to what lies beyond the Gjanicë river valley, both in terms of time and space. As an axis mundi, or universal pillar, the tumulus ensures a fixed and
permanent connection with the sky. In some sense, one could contend that this mound is also a kind of cosmic mountain, a tangible image that strives for and confirms a relationship between the inhabited world and the heavens. It is vital, however, to acknowledge and be mindful of how this tumulus is not situated at the highest point of elevation in the valley. The precise reasons for this are unknown, although we may be able to surmise that the summits of the mountain ridges were the domains of immortals. Nonetheless, to ask why the Lofkënd tumulus is not on a mountaintop would effectively deny its fundamental purpose: to house humans. This mound, while sacred and intimately connected to ritual, was not a temple or abode for the gods. It unambiguously belonged to this world as a place established for mortals, and we must continue to think of it as such (Harrison 2001:398). It is surely more useful and potentially fruitful to explore the deeper significance of why this tumulus is located between the mountain ridges and the valley floor. In what ways may we describe or articulate the relationship between this kind of place and the world above it? Here it is constructive to use Anecdote of the Jar once again as a vehicle for investigation. My aim in using this poem is not to uncover the absolute meaning of the tumulus – an impossible task – but instead to re-evaluate the symbolic boundaries associated with tumuli in general. At the end of
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255 Fig. 3 Morning view toward the tumulus from the northwest; the eastern ridge of the river valley runs behind the foothill of the burial mound.
the second stanza of the poem, Stevens writes: “The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air” (Stevens 2006:66–67). Earlier in this essay I commented upon the emptiness of the jar, and importantly, the quality of expectation that this condition imparts. The vessel, rather than being dispossessed of contents, is instead full of potential. And furthermore, as a “port in air” the jar can also be interpreted as an aperture or gateway. It remains moored to one place but is undeniably associated with passage and movement. All ports, real and imagined, necessarily embody this duality. To some extent, a tumulus can be viewed as a final destination, a ‘harbour’ or place of interment for one’s remains. This is likely one reason why a burial mound is such a useful device for claiming possession of particular piece or section of land. While it can be described as a receptacle, a container for the dead, it is simultaneously understood as a point of departure. The tumulus thereby signifies passage into a different existence, the underworld and afterlife. Even when it was largely abandoned as a gravesite it still formed part of the greater landscape of the Gjanicë River valley. In other words, it was part of the natural habitat of the area, a ‘living’ monument. It is also worthwhile noting that although the identities of the original tumulus builders and dwellers were lost over time, the general, fundamental meaning of this place
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ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
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Fig. 4 View towards the tumulus from the south; the modern cemetery with white tombstones is located just below the hill of the mound, toward the right side of the photograph.
was ultimately unchangeable: It continued to embody a sense of sacredness (cf. Tuan 1977:164). Examining the immediate vicinity of the mound can corroborate this situation. Just below the hill on which the tumulus was built stands a modern cemetery for the local community (fig. 4). The proximity and placement of this new burial ground appears to be a deliberate attempt to harness or subsume the inviolability of the prehistoric tumulus. As such, the graveyard is both a continuation and recreation of a hallowed site. The LofkĂŤnd Archaeological Project itself has specifically addressed how the tumulus may remain as a nexus of human interaction and encounters. Following excavation, the mound was rebuilt to its original height and size (Papadopoulos 2008). The reconstruction has literally reactivated the monument, assuring that it will continue to be a place of connection between the past, present and future. Ultimately it is impossible to know for certain what lies in store for the mound at LofkĂŤnd. However, we can imagine that generations from now the tumulus may continue to exude stature, and that the memories of the dead might still beckon.
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Bibliography: J. C. Barrett, The Mythical Landscapes of the British Iron Age,
M. Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, in: Poetry,
C. Tilley, The Power of Rocks. Topography and Monument
in: W. Ashmore – A. Bernard Knapp (eds.), Archaeologies of
Language, Thought (New York 1971) 141–160
Construction on Bodmin Moor, World Archaeology
Landscape. Contemporary Perspectives (Malden 1999) 253–265 R. Bradley, The Significance of Monuments (London 1998)
D. Lowenthal, Age and Artifact: Dilemmas of Appreciation,
28.2, 1996, Sacred Geography, 161–176
in: D. W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretations of Ordinary
C. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places,
Landscapes. Geographical Essays (Oxford 1979) 103–28
Paths and Monuments (Oxford 1994)
The Archaeology of Monuments and the Archaeology of Deliberate
J.K. Papadopoulos, Mounds of Memory. Burial Tumuli in the Illyrian
Y. Tuan, Space and Place. The Perspective of
Deposits, in: Two Munro Lectures given at the University of
Landscape, in: L. Bejko – R. Hodges (eds.) New directions in Albanian
Experience (Minneapolis 1977)
Edinburgh on 27th and 28th November 1984 (Edinburgh 1985)
Archaeology. Studies presented to Muzafer Korkuti. International Centre
R. Bradley, Consumption, Change and the Archaeological Record.
J. Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton 1981) E. Casey, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History (Berkeley 1998) E. Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world (Bloomington 1993) H. Colvin, Architecture and Afterlife (New Haven 1992) M Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York 1957) H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method2 (London 1989) K. Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA 1997) R.P. Harrison, Hic Jacet, Critical Inquiry 27.3, 2001, 393–407 R.P. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago 2003)
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for Albanian Archaeology Monograph Series 1 (Tirana 2006) 75–84 J. K. Papadopoulos – Sarah Morris – Lorenc Bejko, Reconstructing the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofkënd in Albania, Antiquity 82, 2008, 1–16 J. K. Papadopoulos – Sarah Morris – Lorenc Bejko, Excavations at the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofkënd in Albania. A Preliminary Report for the 2004–2005 Seasons, AJA 111.1, 2007, 105–147 W. Stevens, Collected Poems (London 2006) E. Thomas, Monumentality and the Roman Empire. Architecture in the Antonine Age (Oxford 2007) J. Thomas, Rethinking the Neolithic (Cambridge 1991)
Y. Tuan, Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature, Canadian Geographer 15, 1971,181–192
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Project for a Burial Place St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Marcus Donaghy Mary Laheen
Students Brian Barber Ciaran Conlon Lukas Eugler Caroline Kiernan Maria Mulcahy Meabh McCarty Timothy Murphy Luke O’Callaghan Robert Tobin Enida Skalonjic Patrick Stack Lena Steinbuch Anna Zabiegala
Site section Maria Mulcahy
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Extension of St Mullins Cemetery St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Stephen Tierney
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(left) Site plan (opposite) Model Enda Naughton
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Continuity
Tutors Will Dimond Kevin Donovan
Students Dominic Lavelle Cliodhna Rice
A garden is an example of a suitable arena. For gardening is itself a synthesis of explorations, requiring the gardener to be craftsman, scientist and artist… Also intelligent enough to keep these roles and qualities in balance: for a weak imagination can be overpowered by unremitting craftsmanship to give a trivial pretty-pretty display; or by too forceful intellect to offer mere rhetoric…from Harvesting the Edge, G.F. Dutton, gardener, scientist, poet, mountaineer and wild-water swimmer
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In the twentieth century, economic pressures, vested interests and incoherent planning structures have conspired to threaten our urban and rural environments with poor quality development. The natural and man-made systems that have supported our inhabitation of city and countryside, once driven by necessity and economy, have been allowed to fragment, and have become increasingly suppressed or erased. Continuity examines this frayed context and asks how we can bring about positive change; how can we make an architecture that is continuous, shared and rooted? In employing a diverse range of studies to unravel the landscape, our group aspires to make robust and enduring work that both exploits and complements its place.
(left)
Interested initially in the feeling of place,
is proposing the integration of this traditionally
Development sketch
transmitted through occupancy and the
rural system of living into the semi-urban
(opposite)
weathering of materials, Dominic Lavelle,
setting of Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. Through
Site plan
surveyed a dilapidated mill and in the
a series of buildings and productive gardens,
Dominic Lavelle
countryside of south Co. Kilkenny, using a
some existing and reused, he hopes to re-
combination of analytical and atmospheric
establish erased links in both building fabric
drawings. Meanwhile, a concern with the
and community, operating primarily on the
psychological effect of material and making
thick threshold between privacy and publicity
on the inhabitants of buildings and landscape
to integrate a new community in an existing
led to research into Camphill Communities’
wider social framework.
centers for people with special needs. Dominic
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Cliodhna Rice began her exploration of the relationship of domestic space to its environment in a number of sectional models of precedents, drawing on her experience of a semester’s study in Norway. An interest in landscape with continuous but evolving and diverse inhabitation brought her to isolate a site at the confluence of two lakes in the drumlins of Co. Cavan. Having made primer projects based on minimal intervention but heightened effect, she is proposing to make an inn that responds to the continuous horizontal datum of water and the verticality of forest and vernacular construction. The inn will gather the various uses of the territory in a complex building, whilst dealing with issues of topography, landscape and ecology, in their broadest sense.
264 (left) Site plan (right) Site reflection Cliodhna Rice
(opposite) Year 4 reviews Photo by Alice Clancy
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WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 2
Model Photography Workshop
A workshop exploring model photography was held for Upper School students in the second semester. Led by Alice Clancy and Stephen Tierney, the afternoon sessions involved discussion on representation and the production of imagery and was supplemented by hands-on demonstrations of camera and darkroom techniques.
Group photography collaboration Photos by Su Wang
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INTERVIEW / PETER KEALY
Peter Kealy Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
Peter Kealy is a farmer, living in a former rambling house between Ballycrinegan and Dranagh, Co. Carlow. In 1938, he participated in the 1938 Schools Project, writing essays on folklore and local stories for the Irish Folklore Commission. Kealy continues to tell stories and play the accordion at regular events in Carlow and Wexford.
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Peter Kealy Photo by Frank Clarke, Local Historian
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Lisa Cassidy: You took part in the 1938 project in school, writing about folklore and life at the time. […] I was looking at the stories you would all have written, about St Moling, and the graveyard, and… Peter Kealy: The folklore, is that what you’re saying? As we called it at that time, twas folklore. LC: Can you tell me about that? PK: Well, like you were explaining, the youngsters, well in my class anyway – the higher classes, the adult classes, they’d be asked to write something on a bit of folklore or the like, on the area or what they heard around the fire at home, when we were going to school or doing our copybook and that. That’s what you’re interested in? LC: That’s it. PK: So, like, we all had to write a bit of folklore and do something like that, you know. So whether it was all the truth or what – part of it would be the truth, you know. Maybe when those lads, the ramblers around the fire, when they’d find out the young lads, what they wanted, they might add a little bit to it, but still it was all the truth, like, or most of it would be the truth. Only there’d be a bit of trimmings, as I’d call it.
LC: Can you tell me about the ramblers and the rambling house? PK: Well, the rambling house, the people used to come in and they’d sit around the fire, and they’d be talking and telling about this, that and the other. At that time, there’d be no television or radio or a damn thing like that, you know. They’d have the news of the day.
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I was born here, where we are now, and it’s the border of two townlands – Dranagh is over here and Ballycrinegan is down here and it would take in a stretch of maybe three to four miles, you know. And there’d be someone from that end here, and it would be a kind of rambling house and a meeting place, more or less, because there was always somebody here, and they’d have the news of the day, like if someone was dead or dying or sick, and then they’d be in last night and there’d be someone going to the fair or the market today from one end, and they’d be in the next night for to find out the prices of everything and that, that’s the way they had of meeting and finding out everything and communicating with the outside world, is the only way I could say it. LC: How would the family that owned the house decide to open it? How did a rambling house start, in a particular hosue?
PK: Well, I suppose the way it started was we were here on the border of two townlands and the neighbours from each side, there were different places but this was one of them here, because we were central, it’s like that. LC: And when did it stop? PK: Jesus, it didn’t stop for years, I might as well tell you the truth. When I started to grow up and the brothers and sisters were here, it still went on. The younger people then when they started coming, it was a place here where… I was handy, I used to cut hair, so on a Sautrday night there could be five, six, eight here waiting for a haircut on a Saturday night at eleven o’clock. And then after that, the younger people were coming in and maybe the sisters here, they’d have some friends, and they’d be somebody here, friends, some girls, and you know for yourself that where there were girls there were always boys. I used to be playing a bit of music when I was growing up, and of course on a Saturday, maybe at one o’clock, the hair would be finished cutting and the box would come down, the music, there’d be a half-set or a waltz or something danced before they’d all have us scattered. That’s the way it carried on, until such time that the brothers and sisters got married and then it did out. LC: That must have been great.
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PK: Ah, sure, yeah. LC: And you now have the meeting every two weeks….
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and play music and it’s great, great entertainment. Something like what went on years ago, telling stories and a few yarns and all the rest of it. LC: Who runs that?
PK: We do have meetings down here. Frank is the headmaster, as we call him. It was Frank that started off the history group, and this is all renewed again. LC: Telling stories, and… PK: That’s right, it’s all renewed again, things from the past and it’s all gone down in history again, it’s carrying on. Frank is great that way, like. LC: He’s very interested. PK: He’s very interested, that’s it, and he’s after bringing up an awful lot of things. So, that’s the history of the rambling house. The lads would be around the fire, and maybe there’d be a song, and it was a house where everyone in the family could sing a song, and you might say that’s carried on with myself. All over the county of Wexford down here they have what they call the Rambling House, there was one last Friday night and there’s several of them, there’s sixteen calendar nights in the month in county Wexford, what they call the Rambling House, you know, and someone will sing a song
PK: Sure, different people, all over. I told you there’s fifteen or sixteen calendar nights in the month in different places, so I go to them as well.
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about the banshee. When they’d go out at maybe eleven or twelve o’clock on a winter’s night, they’d be talking about somebody that was sick, and maybe they’d say he or she is not expected by morning, and when they’d go out in the dark of night, the first thing they’d do was listen to see would they hear the banshee, and if they heard the banshee on their way home from rambling, that’s, he or she would be dead by morning, and it’d all be the truth, it would happen. Wherever she’s gone now, I don’t know.
LC: Would you tell stories or sing, or everything? PK: Ah yeah. Different people would be called on to sing a song. There’d be ten or twelve musicians in it. Great pastime for a night, for somebody that don’t be doing anything else. I wouldn’t be a television fan now at all. I’d never see television. Well, I would, but with regard to sitting down and watching a film, I’d have no interest in them. LC: What music do you play?
[…] PK: This was a rambling house, like I said. That time, we were going to school, and there was no electric light, no nothing. We’d be sitting there at the table and an old oil lamp hanging there on the wall, and you’d see your hand. The ramblers would be around the fire and they’d be talking, and you’d be trying to do your homework but you’d one ear cocked, you know the way young lads would be at that time. Different than now.
PK: I play the accordion, the button accordion. LC: Were the ramblers from other towns? LC: In the history group, what stories do people like the most? PK: Ah sure, Jesus, they’d be talking about every bloody thing. I often saw them here and they’d be around the fire and at that time they’d be talking
PK: Ah, from the two townlands at each side of us, that’s all. Maybe someplace else, there’d be an odd one in. They’d come for to meet and to have the old chat. That’s the way it was in those days, big changes now.
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LC: Still the interest in the stories and music, though. People still like them. PK: We had an uncle and he used to play the violin, and he’d come here maybe once a week, and everyone in the family was a singer. My mother was a good singer too. Friday night was the big night of the week because we’d have no school on Saturday, and there was another neighbour down here, the lane, and he was a good singer, and we learned all the songs from him, and divil knows what. Especially that time, sixty, seventy years ago, after the Civil War and that, they sang all the patriotic songs, republican songs, and they were the ones they had at that time. There was no Bonos or Beatles in those days. So we’d be looking forward to Friday night and we’d be up all night singing away, learning the songs, we’d nothing else to do. LC: It sounds pretty good. Would there be food? PK: Food? Jesus. That time, the skillet pot would be hanging over the fire, a pot of stirabout, and I remember there was one fella who used to come in here, and that time everyone used to churn and make their own butter, and what have you, and he’d have a mug of buttermilk, and the skillet would never be taken from over the fire, and he’d dip into the pot of stirabout. I used to love it myself as well. I often saw him, when he’d be finishing up and he’d give me
another sup of milk now, and he’d say “God bless the cow that milked it.” Twas a saying I never heard with anybody, twas a lovely saying, and he’d be after drinking, and, “God bless the cow that milked it.” Everyone was baking their own bread and the bread would be baking there in the night and the mother would be baking the bread and then there’d be the pot of stirabout. There’d be no fancy currant buns or anything like that. All big strong healthy men.
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LC: Would your family all have been farmers? PK: Ah yeah. […]
Did I ever think that something that I wrote or done years ago when I was going to school, that I’d be able to read it now again. […] So now this is coming along, and this is going to be a renewal again, and it’ll be there in another six hundred years again. Sure, that time, people don’t know – there were no cars, my father never had a bicycle. He never rode a bicycle, my father, and no cars, that’s all people had. They had no other communication with the outside world, only they heard from one to the other, the news would be brought, at least three miles from one end of the townland to the other and there’d always be somebody in, and they’d know that, what night I’d be in and maybe what night you’d be in, everyone wouldn’t be in the one night.
LC: When did you get radio? PK: By God, I couldn’t tell you, it would be around… jesus, I suppose it’d be damn near the mid-forties when we had the radio. I remember the first ones, there was one down here in Ballycrinegan, and there was one over here, and when the matches would come and the all-Ireland final and all, and everyone would flock to the radio to hear the matches. I remember one, there was a fella who’d been at the match, and Galway and Kerry were after kicking in an all-Ireland final, and I don’t know which of them won, but those two fellas met that night here, they were talking to the match, and this fella said Galway won. The other said, they didn’t, Kerry won. One of them listening to it in each place you see, and this fella says, sure by God, the radio I was listening to, Galway won, and they had a dispute. That’s as much as I can tell you about the bloody thing. I tell you, there were more people going through that door over the years. Nobody now. Sure, there’d be only one in every house, the way the population has gone. Strange, different times. You were born in the city were you? LC: I was. PK: Sure, you’d have a different life, that’d be very different.
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Rambling House and Music School St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Stephen Tierney
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(right) Ground floor plan (opposite) Site plan Donnacha O’Brien
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
274 (above) Axonometric of passage and stairs (right) Section 1:20 Donnacha O’Brien
(opposite) Site model Photo by Alice Clancy
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TRIBUTE /JIM MURPHY
Jim Murphy A Tribute Loughlin Kealy Emeritus Professor of Architecture UCD
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Jim Murphy Photo by Alice Clancy
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It would seem easy enough to write about Jim Murphy in terms of his work in teaching. Most of his professional life from graduation until his retirement from the School was shaped by his involvement in architectural education, primarily in the studio – about 1500 former students could write with as much authority as anyone.
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Jim taught at UCD from 1973 to 2009. He has taught throughout the school, but it is his time in the third year that, for me at least, captures best the qualities he brought to his teaching work. The third year of study has a particular character and intensity – I remember it well from my own time as a student, and that was long before it became a degree year. Whatever its structure, it implies a crossover point within the programme – a transition. Jim had a clear vision of what was needed in developing architectural thinking in students, sharpening that focus at a key stage of the programme. He brought keen discernment
to the discussion at crits, his calm but sure interventions always finding the seam. He was Year Master for many years, working with different groups of colleagues to maintain a coherent direction at this critical stage in the educational cycle. But there are also other, less well known aspects of his life in academia: his role in the modularisation of programmes; his work in assisting the UCD Architecture programme in La Coruna and his role in leading Architecture as Dean. Taken together, they portray an academic contribution of depth and significance, in which
his quiet intelligence, wit and good humour were instrumental in a time of major change. I feel I can write about the first two in particular with an appreciation based on shared experience – his role as Dean followed my retirement from the school. The exercise of his qualities found a challenging theatre in the changes introduced in the university throughout the re-structuring and modularisation upheavals. Re-structuring was controversial for Architecture as for many other disciplines. The modularisation of programmes across the university was not unanimously welcomed either. In Architecture, while there were misgivings, the approach taken to modularisation was to be proactive – to use the process as a means of realigning aspects of the curriculum. It meant we had to examine options, appraise how essential content could be incorporated, and adapt to a different way of thinking about educational strategies – moving away from idea of knowledge to be inculcated to the idea of the abilities that a student had to attain. Taking that approach from the beginning meant that when the special requirements of Architecture were put forward, there was a willingness to listen. But the business of bringing exemptions and special provisions from expressions of principle to becoming structures and programmes that would be accepted, meant that we had to negotiate through the thicket of emerging regulations and committees that were themselves sometimes unsure of their own
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footing. The timescale insisted on by the university made completing the modularisation process more intensive that it needed to be, although perhaps little would have been gained by prolonging the matter. Jim and I worked closely in parallel. His skills allowed him to navigate between the requirements of our programmes, which were sometimes only as tidily repackaged as we could manage in the time, a computer system that was still working through its own glitches, and the apprehensions of committee members who thought Architecture was getting away with murder. To this day I am still in admiration of his skill and quiet intelligence. He managed the various tasks with such grace that objections faded into acceptance. But there is more to it than that. His achievement not only allowed us to move through this period in a way that laid the ground for further innovation, but I believe it also prepared the ground for others to work towards a more tolerant and sophisticated modularisation framework in their disciplines and through the university as a whole. When we were approached about setting up the UCD Architecture programme at CESUGA, La Coruna in Galicia, my first reaction was a mixture of excitement and caution. The then Executive of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture was not particularly keen. The project in Galicia was led by the Faculty of Commerce, and there was a tangible coolness on the part of some elements in Engineering towards the culture and modus
TRIBUTE /JIM MURPHY
operandi of Commerce as these were understood. We had issues of our own in the school. However, from contact with the people involved in Spain and discussions among colleagues as the idea of the collaboration matured, it seemed that the balance of advantage lay in going with the experiment. The venture could provide an exciting way of re-thinking our own programme, it would provide additional resources to Architecture that were badly needed, and it had the potential to provide a source of postgraduate students in the longer term. Jim was among the first to embrace the idea and the challenge. As matters developed, it would have struggled without him. Developing an architecture programme in the context of a young institution, with inexperienced teachers and with our mutual limitations regarding each other’s language, produced situations that are funny in retrospect, but that were tricky enough at the time. Apart from the content, which is different from what the staff had experienced themselves, there were questions of mindset and of studio-based teaching that were hard to communicate. Jim’s ability to identify points of familiarity that could be built on, his good humour, ease and clarity meant that problems were never allowed to become issues, and diificulties could always be approached in ways that induced solutions. As the engagement developed, Spanish perspectives wove their way into how the programme was conceived: the concern for the wider context
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and its ordering; the relation between landscape and building; the integration of design and realisation within the studio project – all concerns that also echoed Jim’s own thinking, have formed a special character to UCD Architecture in Galicia. Jim has always worn his learning lightly and exercised his authority quietly, efficiently and with empathy. People love his quick-witted, congenial company. They quickly know him to be wise and able. When they know him better they can find that he is not easily deflected and has an ability to produce the unexpected route – a man that knows his own ground. He has been at the core of development of Architecture at UCD. He continues in quasi retirement to break new ground in professional education. It is a great privilege to have worked with him. Ad multos annos.
Jim Murphy’s Retirement Presentation Photo by Alice Clancy
Acknowledgements The editors and yearbook team would like to thank all staff and students of UCD Architecture who made suggestions, contributions and their work available for the production of this Yearbook. Special thanks is also due to all visitors and guests who have also made contributions to UCD Architecture in 2009–10 and subsequently to this publication. In particular we thank: Marina Aldrovandi; Stephen Bates; Gary Boyd; Denis Byrne; Peter Carroll; Douglas Carson; Lisa Cassidy; Andrew Clancy; Tom dePaor; Theo Dorgan; Fergal Doyle; Kenneth Frampton; Elizabeth Hatz; Tom Holbrook; Susan Hussein; Jan Olav Jensen; Edward Jones; Fergal Joyce; Loughlin Kealy; Peter Kealy; Ronan Kenny; Steven Larkin; Patrick Lydon; Niall McCullough; Philip McGlade; Niall McLoughlin; Shelley McNamara; John McPolin; Colm Moore; Sarah Mulrooney; Michael McGarry; Siobhan Ni Eanaigh; Ross Cahill O’Brien; Sandra O’Connell; Robert Payne; Tim Robinson; Peter Salter; Jimi Shields; Dougal Sheridan; Sarah Sheridan; Rhonda Tidy; Billie Tsien; Brian Ward and Tod Williams.
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Landscape & Economy Introduction Peter Cody & Deirdre McKenna April 2010
This yearbook seeks to unfold something of the the many conversations, journeys, experiences and propositions that have taken place in the school over the course of the past year under the broad guise of the shared theme of “Landscape and Economy.” An exploration that has led to many chance meetings, revelations and shared inspiration as various paths of inquiry intertwine and overlap with one another. As the school now oscillates year on year from city to landscape, this alternating hinterland forms both backdrop and staging to the act of inquiry itself. Later in this edition you will encounter the words of Peter Kealy. Peter an elderly farmer, living in a former rambling house between Ballycrinegan and Dranagh, Co. Carlow participated in the 1938 Schools Project, writing essays on folklore and local stories for the Irish Folklore Commission. Interviewed by Lisa Cassidy his final words linger in the mind.
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PK: I tell you, there were more people going through that door over the years. Nobody now. Sure, there’d be only one in every house, the way the population has gone. Strange, different times. You were born in the city were you? LC: I was. PK: Sure, you’d have a different life, that’d be very different.
Across this landscape of difference, our lives co-mingle with the residue of previous human labour, of past occupation. The girth provided by
the ensuing distance of time and the specificity of place lend much of this year’s work its unique character and appearance. Our encounters and subsequent propopsitions are documented through the thematic structure of economy, archaeology, production, infrastructure, navigation, culture, dwelling and memory. We are led in turn to the rich and disparate offerings of Tom Holbrook’s archaeology of the industrial wasteland of the Lea Valley, London, Aurelio Galfetti’s introduction of geological time into his brief navigation of Bellinzona, Stephen Bate’s sensory description of the long gallery in Hardwick Hall, a nosegay of tapestry and rushes, Will Dimond’s forensic re-construction of the military road in Co. Wicklow, Samantha McAulliffe’s slow unravelling of the tumulus of Lofkënd in her essay A Landscape of Eternal Dwelling, Mary Laheen’s evocation of the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordillera, to Bridie Lawlor and Mary O’Neill the gatekeepers of memory at the St Mullins Heritage Centre, Co. Carlow. Through all of this we have sought first and foremost to demonstrate something of the intensity of everyday life and culture of the school, the lecture series, exhibitions, journeys, reviews, discussions, social occasions; rituals that provide the cadence and meter of college life. This book a repository of our collective thought and labour, a short breath before we begin again.
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INTRODUCTION / JOHN TUOMEY
Landscape & Economy Introduction John Tuomey
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Odlums Mill Photo by Stephen Tierney
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This year all of our studio work was set in a broad context of the Landscape, in a complementary continuation of last year’s projects being based in Dublin city. Alternating school-wide concentration from city to landscape-related studies seemed to make sense in this second session of our recently revised two-year cycle of Middle and Upper School studios. We chose the theme of Economy to encourage constructive discussion on the current conditions affecting architecture in these strange times. Academic culture cannot be isolated from the wider world. Architectural education prepares our graduates for future directions in practice. Research at the school demonstrates that critical reflection can contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship of architecture to culture and society. Contemporary landscapes are utterly changed by the uncontained extension of towns and by unforeseen shifts in agricultural policy. Economy remains a constant value inherent in the ethos of architecture. Siting and Strategy Questions of siting and strategy recurred, forming the common ground for much of our discussion in the studios this year. Visiting critics were invited to address these questions in a series of Friday lunchtime lectures held in the Red Room. Staff contributed to the Into Landscape lectures held on Monday evenings after studio. These short talks,
with visitors and staff showing their hand, provided stimulating breaks for students from the routine of tutorials and reviews as well as generating deeper inspirational stimulus for further works and days to come. The school itself is a strategic site in Irish architectural culture and this forum will be further developed in parallel with public exhibition and research projects. Changing Times
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We have initiated a renewed emphasis on skills acquisition, focused on Monday’s studio progamme in the Foundation and Middle School, and further evident throughout the building laboratory and technology project work and Upper school seminars. We intend to reinforce our students’ confidence in the tools of their trade, in the techniques of representation that connect theory to practice, connecting hand to eye to mind in the comfort of competence. Some of the creative energy involved in the joys of making and learningby-doing emerged out of our staff and students positive experience of the various summertime sessions of the now what? workshops. Last summer, in response to the immediate difficulties being experienced by new and recent graduates, we opened the facilities of UCD Architecture studios to anyone who had an interesting project to propose. These workshops broke through the gloom of
the economic crisis and refreshed the air, giving voice and visibility to the commitment of a new generation of architects. The now what? workshops reminded us of a timeless truth of critical practice, that engagement is not only predicated on paid employment, and that creative work can be its own reward. Out of such small beginnings come future renewals. Timely new ideas emerge to be tested in changing times.
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& ECONOMY Sarah Lisa O’Kane presenting work for review Photo by Alice Clancy
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Jan Olav Jensen Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
INTERVIEW / JAN OLAV JENSEN
Jan Olav Jensen visited UCD School of Architecture as guest critic for Fourth Year interim reviews on 25th and 26th February 2010, giving a lecture on the work of Jensen & Skodvin in relation to the landscape. John Tuomey described Jensen & Skodvin as “[making] architecture with a special sensitivity to the given conditions that surround them, the given conditions of the culture in Norway, and the landscape and nature.”
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Jensen began the lecture by stating: Mostly, the Norwegian landscape is looked at in a romantic way, and it is thought of as something fantastic. I’ve been looking in Norwegian literature for a long time to find someone who is critical or unsentimental about the landscape, and I found this: I am not able to get rest and feel at home in any landscape, and that is not the fault of humans, it is nature’s fault. I cannot understand the poets! They will find any landscape beautiful and harmonic. There must be something seriously wrong with their minds! How is it possible for them to overlook all this chaos, this mess, this ugliness? Most disgusting are the deep valleys, with rivers and forests in the bottom and steep cliff walls on either side. It gives me a headache and makes me want to puke. —Rolf Stenersen
I think it’s a very deep insight, because landscape is basically chaotic. It is not possible to represent landscape exactly in theory, and it’s not possible in practice. I asked Jensen about working in landscape, particularly in the Norwegian context, where he estimates that less than 10% is man-made: I absolutely think you can change the landscape. If you look at the rice terraces in Asia, it’s a way to cultivate landscape which I think is sensible, and it has been done in such a way that the landscape
is intact and I think that is absolutely possible to do. But I think all landscapes have different levels of fixing themselves or becoming nature, and if you think about carving in stone or blasting in stone or rock, it will probably never heal, because there is a mark from this activity that humans have made, and I think you have to recognize this responsibility – if you do it in soil, the human traces will go away after a while, and if you do it in snow, it will go away after a few days, or in water it will go very quickly, so all these marks leave different timestamps. When you do something that becomes a permanent scar, you should really think hard if this is the thing to do forever. I think also that is the case with old trees – maybe it will take two hundred years to have the same size again. I think one should carefully assess if it is necessary. I think permanence… you can think about it in different ways. If you can take it away, then the landscape is more or less as it was, then that is a type of intervention that I like. I think if you just add things to what is there and you don’t destroy what is there, I think this is a way to do it that is sensible. Of course, sometimes it’s more demanding because it’s more costly, but in the sense that we don’t know what will happen in the next fifty years or the next two hundred years or the next five hundred years, I think it’s good that we restrain ourselves from making all the scars that we are making now.
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Jensen described working with constraints on projects such as the Lepers’ Hospital and the Liasanden Rest Area: I think this is what makes architecture for me interesting – this is one of the main characteristics of architecture and what makes it different from art. If you’re an artist, you can make a window that does not give you light, and you can call it a window and it can be interesting, and you can make a door that does not open or a roof that leaks and you can call it art, but as an architect you have to deal with the basic needs, usually, and you have to solve problems. There is almost always a necessity, which starts architecture, there is a need for something, and I enjoy that very much. In the needs, there are a lot of constraints and difficulties and economy. During the lecture, Jensen spoke about the approach the practice took to the project at Liasanden: There is a road, and there is a lay-by, about 200m long, and it goes through a very old pine forest. What we did was to add gravel, this is the only thing we did. We found places in the landscape where we could have gravel at different levels, where it would act almost like a river, but not horizontal, and we were able to find a road-like way through this forest without cutting down any of the trees. In just a few weeks, it appeared, like this – almost like an instant Japanese garden.
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INTERVIEW / JAN OLAV JENSEN
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Jan Olav Jensen Photo by Stephen Tierney
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We thought it was interesting, the lines where the topography meets the gravel, because we didn’t draw them – it was the result of a formula, and that was the core of this project. I asked about the role of the view when building in the landscape: For me, the view is mainly of interest because it does something with the room, and you get, for instance with the Landscape Hotel, in some cases the whole valley becomes part of your room and that is an architectural effect or architectural quality that could be interesting, to achieve this very, very large room that you live in, the sense of a very large room which is maybe 2km deep and you have a small corner which is warm, and it’s not because the view in itself is particularly beautiful – I think you can do exactly the same in the city. This is not our invention at all, it’s a deep part of modern architecture – to make the rooms larger, you play with the possibilities that the glass can give you, for instance. In some cases [the framing] has become particularly important to solving it, it helps your ideas. With the Landscape Hotel, I think that was crucial – it would not have been the same effect if you had the framing inside the room, in my opinion, even though that was what was suggested in the beginning.
Jensen described his experience as a visiting critic and as an architect working abroad: For me, architecture is in many ways a very international profession, but of course it has local connections, and the competence that you have when you live in a place…one might not think so much about it but I think there are reasons for architects to be local. We have done projects in other countries and I don’t think that is wrong but it’s demanding, both when it comes to time and travel, and it is also demanding because I think you are obliged to understand a lot about the place you are working in and the culture there, and what we do as architects will give different conditions to the people who use our work so it is mostly a responsibility, being an architect, because you have the power to change people’s lives on that special level. It has direct consequences, if you make a house, for instance, to how people live – it might not be the most important thing in their lives but I think it is important enough that you take it very seriously.
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Jan Olav Jensen graduated from Oslo School of Architecture in 1985, and established Jensen & Skodvin with Børre Skodvin in 1995. Jensen (with Per Christian Brynildsen) received the 1989 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Lepers’ Hospital in India, and two Jensen & Skodvin projects were nominated for the 2009 Mies Van Der Rohe Award. He has taught at the Oslo School of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and acted as visiting critic in numerous universities in Scandinavia and beyond.
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The Richview Society
EVENTS / SOCIETIES
The Richview Society is an informal forum for discussion of issues of context in architecture: society, culture, economics, and politics. Any person interested in such a discussion is encouraged to join in. The Society has been formed because some students and staff felt a desire for constructive criticism of the profession and its response to problems of society and culture. Architecture exists within the framework of society, and beyond matters of form and function can be found deep currents of critical theory and reaction. Without theoretical research at this level, the formal experiments of Architecture can never be more than restless and ephemeral. In semester two a talk was given by celebrated Irish artist Oliver Comerford entitled Making Landscape, which coincided with a major exhibition of his work at the RHA Gallery, Dublin. Additionally, the Society presents regular film screenings, as opportunities for stimulation and discussion.
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Screening Programme 2009/10 Il Deserto Rosso, Michelangelo Antonioni (1964, Italy) Los Angelos Plays Itself, Thom Andersen (2003, USA) Inland Empire, David Lynch (2006, USA/Poland) The Perverts Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek (2006) The Exterminating Angel, Luis Bunuel (1962, Spain) Elephant, Gus Van Sant (2003, USA) You, the Living, Roy Andersson (2007, Sweden) Gerry, Gus Van Sant (2002, USA) London, Patrick Keiller (1992, United Kingdom) Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927, Germany) Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov (1929, Soviet Union) Werckmeister Harmonies, Bela Tarr (2001, Hungary)
Photo by Stephen Tierney
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EVENTS / VARIOUS / SEMESTER 1
now what?
Now Architects have time to think. Architects are educated to solve problems and propose innovative solutions. now what? was an initiative designed to tap into the wealth of creative talent amongst graduates and students who need space to research, learn new skills and people to discuss these with. What A series of multi-disciplinary public conversations; workshops; studio space and facilities available for research; publication of all work plus a public exhibition. The entire initiative was to operate as a think-tank, was free of charge and ran on a voluntary basis.
Workshop in progress Interpretations of an Image Photo by Alice Clancy
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Workshops 1.
Learning Space Deirdre McKenna and Emmett Scanlon
10. 1989–2009 Monument Time
Scale Architects in collaboration with Brian Ward and Gary Farrelly
2. Cohesive Construction
Colm Moore, Andrew Clancy and Ryan Kennihan
19. Sounding Boxes
Steve Larkin and Daire Bracken 20. A Day in the Light
11. Derive: Sunrise to Sunset
Fiona Hughes and Orla Murphy
Nuala Flood 3. Communicative Constructs
Cian Deegan and Alice Casey
21. Atelier Architecture – A New Public Space 12. Interior View – The Idea of a Building
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Nathalie Weadick
Stephen Tierney 4. The Spirit of Gracious Living… Few Opportunities
Generate This Kind of Dream Jo-Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy 5. Twenty-four Seven
13. Synthetic Landscapes
22. Interact!
Gordon Gibb
Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin and David Healy 14. Model(s) Work(s)
Laura Harty and Aideen Lowery
23. Fab_Lab
James McBennett
Chris Boyle 24. now what? Read
6. Flipside
15. Interpretations of an Image
Nuala Flood and Ciara Keohane 7.
Multiplex Alice Clancy and James Rossa O’Hare
8. Remaking the Modern Suburb
James Leahy 9. Architypes
Conor & David
Dearbhla McManus
Francis Mathews and Laura Kelly 16. Public Space Mapping
Alan Mee 17.
On Hold? Roland Bosbach and Manuel Diez Garrido
18. From the Ground Up
Anne Gorman
An exhibition of the work carried out took place from 9th–20th October 2009, at Unit 14, Smithfield Plaza, Dublin 7. It reflected the multi-disciplinary interests of those involved and included 1:1 construction, photography, paintings, a fully operating ‘sound-box’, architectural models, maps, furniture and films plus drawings, research and books.
www.nowwhatrichview.blogspot.com
LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
EVENTS / VARIOUS / SEMESTER 1
Public Conversations Home 20th July 2009 Panelists: Hugh Campbell (Chair), Gerry Stembridge, Shane O’Toole, Michael Pike, Ali Grehan Common Space 29th July 2009 Panelists: Alan Mee (Chair), Aidan J. French, Ali Grehan, Ken McCue, Seoidin O’Sullivan Monument Time I 24th August 2009 Panelists: Scale Architects, Sean Hillen Monument Time II 25th August 2009 Panelists: Gary Farrelly, Brian Ward, Ide Moloney On Hold 26th August 2009 Panelists: On Hold Evening Conversation 21st September 2009 Interpretations of an Image, Interior View
16 now what? exhibition opening night Photo by Alice Clancy
Evening Conversation 5th October 2009 Public Space Mapping, Synthetic Landscapes, Derive Evening Conversation 12th October 2009 Sounding Boxes, Communicative Constructs, Cohesive Construction
(opposite) now what? opening night lecture Photo by Mads Bruun
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LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Travellers’ Inn Staging post for coaches and travellers Cashel, County Tipperary
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Hidden Garden
Making Sarah’s model
Photo by Sarah Lisa O’Kane
Photo by Patrick Roche
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Ground floor plan, Cashel Sarah Lisa O’Kane
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LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Landscape Seeds Gate-lodge, Laboratory and Teaching Rooms Lyons Estate, County Kildare
Tutors Marcus Donaghy Deirdre McKenna
Students John Crowley Sean Finegan Brian Massey Patrick McGrath Padraig McMorrow Conor Morrissey Kieran Murray Aisling Ni Dhonnchu Aine Nic an Riogh Patrick Phelan Emilie Rigal Ekaterina Samodurova Raukura Turei Cait Elliot Emmet Kenny Jennifer O’Leary Alison Rea Cliodhna Rice St. John Walsh Brendan Ward
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Lyons Estate Photo by St. John Walsh
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
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Perspective drawings St. John Walsh
LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Workrooms Section St. John Walsh
(opposite) Structure/Drainage Model St. John Walsh
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LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
ESSAY / ALAN MEE
Spatial Chaos Addressing spatial over-production in Dublin Alan Mee Director of Urban Design, School of Architecture, Landscape & Civil Engineering, UCD
When a small island economy grows to produce unprecedented levels of wealth, from a primarily agriculture base only decades before, much of the confidence and prosperity created expresses itself in a physical form. Specifically in Dublin, rapid unchecked change has led to a type of spatial chaos. This paper examines certain outlying, boundary or edge areas of Dublin City, with particular emphasis on recent development, considering the context of recent change and formal aspects of the areas. Certain parts of Dublin, termed ‘emerging outlying density areas’, are discussed at the scale of the city, leading to observations on current spatial trends in Dublin. The reason for this emphasis is the more particular focus of the enquiry, related to locations just beyond the city centre, which have been growing fast but which lack legibility and identity,
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particularly at the new centres. These particular situations, like much of recent development in Ireland, have been under-analysed and little studied, particularly across the design scales. They were developed quickly, with favourable political and economic conditions contributing to a building boom. As they occur on the edges of (or beyond) the more historically defined urban entities like city centre or historic urban village centre, they have struggled to become locations with a particular character. For the purposes of this paper, Dublin could be considered in the context of the terms ‘produced space’ and ‘spatial chaos’, as defined and described by Henri Lefebvre in his book, The Production of Space,1 first published in 1974. The French philosopher, whose work began with sociological enquiries into rural and peasant societies, later wrote extensively on urbanisation and spatial practices, connecting local scales to global change. At a time when the island of Ireland is still struggling to evolve towards an urbanised identity, particularly in its physical form, the writings of Lefebvre have exceptional relevance. Currently, Lefebvre-influenced writings and research, while evolving theory and extending thinking in fields as diverse as sociology and feminism, mainly confine discussion to particular physical or scale aspects of his writings (the city, urban life, etc), often bypassing the fact that his writing was not confined to addressing spatial
practice at any single scale or physical definition. For Lefebvre, the daily work patterns of the French farm labourer, and the complex intersections of capital in the urban megalopolis were equally important to observe, sometimes simultaneously. Another curious aspect of current discourse around the work of Lefebvre is that it tends towards academia, abstraction and theory, leaving little room for pragmatics, specifics or practical application. In discussing the term ‘produced’ space, it is useful to review Lefebvre’s definitions of the words ‘product’ (can be reproduced exactly, is the result of repetitive acts and gestures), and ‘works’ (unique, original, primordial). Products are seen as the antithesis of works. In his writings, contemporary urban space is mainly viewed as a physical representation of economic and political forces or power, leading to a mass production of physical form, and the spaces this contains, at all scales. The differences between creation and production, nature and labour, the unique and the reproducible, difference and repetition, help us to define the term ‘produced’ space.2 Here, the term ‘produced’ space relates to recent rapid growth in the quantity of constructed areas and buildings together with an assessment that much of this is ‘produced’ rather than created or designed. Relating these definitions to Dublin, it is proposed that the lack of identity or coherence of these new areas is the result of an unconscious, disjointed or unconsidered process
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of decision-making at numerous scales or levels. In area and building terms, it could be argued that this type of produced space has particular manifestations; often dislocated, inefficiently used, in non-adaptable development, with inappropriate density, poor performance, low architectural quality, and a lack of specificity and character. Henri Lefebvre’s description of the expression ‘spatial chaos’ is worth quoting in full;3 The combined result of a very strong political hegemony, a surge in the forces of production, and an inadequate control of markets, is a spatial chaos experienced at a parochial scale just as on a worldwide scale… Might not the spatial chaos engendered by capitalism, despite the power and rationality of the state, turn out to be the systems Achilles’ heel?
Inherent in the writing of Lefebvre is the consideration of quality, what this constitutes, how it is achieved, and who, or which kinds of societies cause it to come about. It is clear that the product is considered by the author to be less valuable than the ‘work’, which according to his logic, would be the ideal achievement of a society, and also that too much production can lead to a spatial chaos. It should also be stated that the term ‘chaos’ is currently less of a bad thing than at the time when Lefebvre was writing, as an observer of a world increasingly beyond control. Currently, scientists and others consider that chaos may even contain
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many positive properties, and that the study of chaos theory may lead to advances in many fields. However, for the purposes of this discussion we may align with his assessment that chaos implied disordered, dysfunctional space. Regarding the scope of this enquiry, a question arises as to the level of detail at which to examine these emerging outlying density areas. As the primary level of interest here is related to form, including visual or physical aspects of space and place, this study does not deal in detail with the cultural, social, economic, political or other factors and processes leading to the realisation of these developments. The two particular levels of scale relevant to this study, the city or urban scale and the neighbourhood or area scale, are analysed here primarily in relation to urban and building form. While other levels of scale could include district, street, plot, or even building, the inter-relationship between these two scales of examination will allow general observations to be made, and conclusions to be drawn for the city and area, while also having awareness of particular site conditions and their variations. Certain recently developed areas of Dublin can be highlighted as having characteristics in common. These are termed ‘emerging outlying density areas’, as they demonstrate heightened levels of recent development activity, have not evolved from historic village or town centres, are being more densely developed than the surrounding densities, and are
ESSAY / ALAN MEE
more commonly identified generally as areas rather than towns, centres or distinct parts of Dublin City. While some other locations around Dublin City display similar traits, these particular areas have been selected for the certain reasons; clear physical boundaries or edges to the new entity, active recent planning and development history in the particular location, also rapid physical change, and projections of significant additional population growth. These areas display evidence of an environment (patterns, densities, qualities) which differs radically from the surroundings. There has been little previous study of these areas by urbanism, architecture or planning, particularly post-occupancy. There is also an apparent lack of overall identity, pre-established public realm and connectivity in the urban structure and form of the new areas. Another feature of these locations is the proximity to major city infrastructure or built fabric, (also defined by Lefebvre as ‘works’) whether transport, utilities, etc. and the resulting sense of spatial severance or ‘disconnect’ from the surroundings generally, but also from the traditionally recognised image of the city of Dublin. Many are developed on green-field, former industrial or brown-field sites, adding to the sense of isolation from established patterns of urban life in Dublin. Four areas in particular are of broadly similar size, are similarly located outside of the city centre, have new resident populations and rapid recent
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growth, and display densities which depart from the surrounding patterns. They are Sandyford, Tallaght, Adamstown and North Fringe, each of which could be regarded as a new town, though this term is rarely used in connection with any of the four. Each has a distinct political history: Sandyford, an industrial estate, expanded into residential use due to public transport infrastructure provision without an overall master plan, Tallaght was the result of a political decision to incentivise an ‘urban renewal area’ in 1988,4 Adamstown is a new master-planned town, located as a result of being a suitable greenfield location on a major rail line, (located on one side only of the line), and North Fringe, another green-field location, also benefits, (on one side only again) from a major rail link. In fact, as should be the case, public transport provision has been a major factor in the development of all four new areas. However, at the scale of the city, these areas can be seen as ‘produced’ rather than ‘worked’, less the result of a collective will or collective thought, more solely the results of productive and economic force. From an assessment of the location, use, density, performance and quality aspects of buildings and neighbourhood blocks in these four areas, it can be concluded that the areas are ‘produced’ environments, rather than ‘created’ or designed ones. The visual impression of this type of area is a form of spatial chaos, whereby the overall development lacks coherence, unity, and
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a legible centre, has unclear edges, and displays overall identity dysfunction. These four areas, like many parts of Dublin containing recently developed new areas and buildings, have an over-supply of produced space. The question arises as to whether the overproduction of space in Dublin is purely to do with development density, an aspect of development, like height of buildings, which can dominate debate. It is argued that other issues, including location, use, performance and quality should also be discussed, although obviously, the issue of over-production of space is closely connected with allowable densities. For example, it is arguable that if development is of a high quality, the density may be less inappropriate, or easier to withstand. Similarly, density in the correct location could be argued to be more sustainable than not, and an appropriate use in development relevant to location could be argued to be a positive density. Finally, if the development envelope performs appropriately, whether in energy use, adaptability, etc, then it could possibly be considered less inappropriate in density terms. It is worth noting that the predominant method of development control in the UK and Ireland includes performing planning systems (in which development rights are conferred after evaluation of individual projects) as opposed to the more widespread and traditional conforming planning
systems of Europe, in which development rights are assigned in advance, and generally conform with a collective strategy.5 In this Irish situation, owners of sites can be granted permissions for development in the absence of an overall plan for an area, leading to much incoherent development of new areas. In the Dublin context, Lefebvrian spatial chaos and over-production could be virtual as well as physical. Many planning permissions have been granted for development which may not be completed or even started immediately, due to phasing or economic conditions, which have changed radically recently. These proposals could represent one version of an area, because they have been granted permission, but are not physically contributing to it yet. Similarly, the two bed apartment, the basic trading unit of the Irish property boom, was often ‘flipped’ or bought and then sold on in advance of actual completion, part of the mirage of abstract wealth created. In conclusion, the rapid change in recently emerging outlying density areas of Dublin has led to a form of spatial chaos, which can be measured and assessed, working from some practical applications of Lefebvrian theory, a branch of spatial thinking which has extreme relevance currently for development, consolidation, and even shrinkage in Dublin and Ireland. Henri Lefebvre, arguably the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century, and especially important for all
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of those working in spatial design across all scales, left a written legacy which could usefully transform into practical and pragmatic ways to save us from ourselves spatially, by implication economically, and most of all, spiritually.
1 Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space (English translation of ‘Production de l’espace’). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2 Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space (English translation of ‘Production de l’espace’). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 75 3 Ibid., p. 63 4 McDonald, Frank and Sheridan, Kathy (2008). The Builders. Dublin: Penguin Books. 5 Rivolin, Umberto Janin (2008). Conforming and Performing Planning Systems in Europe; An Unbearable Cohabitation. Planning, Practice and Research, Vol. 23, No. 2, May 2008, pp. 167–186
This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th International Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU), November 2009, in Amsterdam/Delft, titled “The New Urban Question – Urbanism beyond Neo-Liberalism”.
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Midland Market
Tutors Emmett Scanlon Sarah Cremin
Students Therese Nolan Iseult O’Clery St. John Walsh
We proposed the idea of ‘market’ in order facilitate a debate about the potential of architecture to enable or disable an individual’s meaningful engagement with the social, physical and material world. Markets are predicated on social exchange. Markets are both physical and virtual. They are romantic, places of gathering, connection, argument and trade. They require use to exist, indeed they depend upon it. The market is also an abstract and ruthless economic phenomemon. It is an entity bound up in structures, those of legislation and regulation. Therese, Iseult and St. John elected to work in the midland-market town of Nenagh, in County Tipperary, and to work collectively to explore the current physical, social and economic condition of this town. Their studies showed, that in common with many Irish towns, Nenagh has recently developed on its edge, its centre panned flat and thin by the relentless commuter draw to the employment cities of Limerick
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and Galway. Large commercial centres have been developed for shopping convenience and economic imperatives and unimaginative, speculatively built housing in peripheral locations now houses the majority of Nenagh’s population. The town centre of Neneagh is depleted and hollow, a broken and fractured landscape, with a population that arguably has lost connection to the heart of the place they live. This landscape – economic, physical and social – becomes the setting for the work of the group. While the subject of the exploration is specific, the condition is not, and the current landscape of Nenagh is also to be found in a great many Irish towns. Taken together, the work seeks to examine the kind of collective and civic space that might now be appropriate in Irish towns, and discusses the role of architecture in this enabling such new spaces to exist.
Group discussion around model Self-portrait by group
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LANDSCAPE & ECONOMY
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Structure and laneways model Iseult O’Cleary
Iseult O’Clery has examined the laneways of Nenagh and in her project seeks to understand the potential civic role of these fractured spaces. By inserting an education insititution into the existing civic core and working back into
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the existing lanes, the ambition is to trigger a development of courts and gardens, new public spaces in the interior of the oldest fabric of the town.
Therese Nolan seeks to provide theatre, sport and social facilities for the youth of Nenagh, distinct yet informal spaces, public space on the edge of town for a population often left on the margins of society.
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St. John Walsh makes a market project in the centre of Nenagh. He combines a carpark, supermarket, farmers Model
Drawing of roof structure
market and community rooms in order to make new,
Therese Nolan
St. John Walsh
sustainable, common ground in the centre of Nenagh.
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
The Space Between
Tutors Gerry Cahill Carmel Murray
Students Martin Tiernan Piers Floyd Aoiffe O’Kelly
The Space Between situates itself in a landscape of edges and boundaries. The group aspires to examine the threshold between made/unmade, urban/rural, occupied/unoccupied, used/disused places in different locations. Three distinct and uniquely challenging places were selected by the students – an abandoned quarry on the river Corrib in Co. Galway; a partly built city centre block in Dublin’s Liberties and a disused industrial site in Kilrush, Co. Clare, bounded on one side by the sea and the town on the other. Common themes through the work are engagement and reuse of the abandoned and forgotten and the re-imagining of the future of these locations through energetic process-centred programmes. These include; activity related buildings for craft and work, theatre and dance, therapy and sanctuary, pause and reflection to address the ‘cultural spaces between’ people in modern society.
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Piers Floyd is inspired by dance. He creates a choreography of movement and engagement through a city centre block. A dance school and theatre that embraces the use of passage and arcade as the connective space between. The discipline and elegance of dance dictate the tempo for the project to embrace, oversail, pull the citizen in and under, holding for a moment or longer before release allows engagement with the internal and external spaces of the city beyond. This new inhabited urban block provides opportunities for community use and through the manipulation of site section makes visual and functional connections to the neighbourhood.
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35 Martin Tiernan discovered a “landscape of extraction” on the shores of Lough Corrib. His journey brought him from the meticulous mapping of the secret world of his father’s shed to the quarry he proposes to reuse as a sculptor’s village. The intention is to ‘tread softly’, mindful of what has (left)
(above left)
gone before and the past significance of this place to the
City Block: Place and Passage
The Abandoned Quarry: Engagement #1
local community. The memory of the craft of quarrying, the
(above)
(above right)
importance of the nature of stone, its materiality, the cut
Dance: Movement and Balance
The Abandoned Quarry: Engagement #2
and resistance of the rock, building against, near to, inside
Piers Floyd
Martin Tiernan
and on top of this man made void drives the project.
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Aoiffe O’Kelly inhabits a disregarded industrial site on the edge of a west of Ireland town. Although sited on the harbour it acts as a fracture rather than a connection between land and sea, short-circuiting the potential amenity and activity of the space between habitation and ocean. She intends to reinvigorate, “connect the past with possibilities for the future”. Her employment-generating industrial plant proposes to develop the commercial possibilities of seaweed production to reinvigorate the town’s economy. A seaweed baths and hydrotherapy spa makes use of the restorative and medicinal potential of this material. A work method of model making allows examination and debate of the varied formal implications of combining industry and leisure, process and production between earth and water.
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
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(left) Walls and Water (opposite) Land and Sea #2 Aoiffe O’Kelly
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UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
& PRODUCTION Work in progress by Shea Gallagher Photo by Sarah Lisa O’Kane
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
Over-sight/Site/Cite/Cité Human Settlements Within World Order Irene Kelly
ESSAY / IRENE KELLY
Over-sight/Site/Cite/Cité: Human Settlements Within World Order forms part of the ‘Research and Innovation’ seminar series for fourth year students. This is a difficult discussion to partake in, unless at least a weather eye is cast towards the informal settlements of the developing cities. This year I had the medium available to broach such a subject matter within the six-student seminar group. The following is an account of the structure behind this medium, observations that were made during the nine days and the future goals of the project.
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A ‘Networking Grant’ was secured from Irish Aid and Higher Education and Research Institutes (2007–2011) to undertake a study into ‘NetworkedInformality’.1 The destination was Lagos Nigeria, a mega city where it is estimated that fifty-three people start new lives every hour, and according to 1999 UN statistics will reach 24.5 million people by 2015. The intention of the programme is to enable collaborative networking between third level institutions. Phase 1, in the form of a contactmaking mission to the city from 18th to 27th October 2009 has been completed. I travelled as a representative of UCD, along with Dr. Mick O’Kelly, both an artist and lecturer in the Fine Art Sculpture Department in NCAD. Informal practices are evident in Lagos and have previously been provocatively covered by the work of Rem Koolhaas and the Harvard Project on the City.2 The work labels Lagos as a ‘paradigmatic case-study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity’. Although admirable in skewing the West’s lead authority within the architectural referential system, this work has been criticized in failing to recognize the dysfunctional parallels to the dynamic urban form of Lagos. Matthew Gandy in his work, ‘Planning, Anti-Planning and the Infrastructure Crises Facing Metropolitan Lagos’, offers a very comprehensive explanation of the current state of Lagos from an environmental history vantage point.3 Gandy talks about the phenomenon of ‘involution’,
a characteristic that is not familiar to European cities, which entails vast populace expansion with economic decline. Unlike a city at the forefront of a globalizing modernity, Gandy assigns the term ‘truncated modernity’ to the city of Lagos, a city which lacks the usual colonial legacy of a broadreaching infrastructural imprint. This effect came about through the method of investment, which used false categories such as ‘African Tradition’ and ‘Colonial Precinct’ to be discriminatory. The purpose of our trip was to meet with our counterparts in Lagos and to devise a channel for the following stages of the networking grant. Observations on how Lagosians make space became the germinal first step in our brief. David Harvey, in his ontological discussion on the ‘nature of space’,4 claims that this question, ‘What is space?’ can be replaced by the question ‘how is it that different human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualizations of space?’The breakdown of the transport infrastructure of Lagos is fertile ground for this discussion, as compared to what Harvey describes as absolute space, i.e. within which monopoly control can operate, the road system takes place in relative space, or space that exists to overcome the friction of distance for the movement of people, goods, services and information. Diurnally, the sheer capacity of traffic that use the roads, momentarily provide a semblance of a public realm, in the sense that the ‘Go-Slow’, or traffic jam,
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offers possibilities for interaction, what Koolhaas calls ‘rampant entrepreneurialism’. This umbrella term consists of people whose fixed market stalls, tagged as illegal settlements, were razed because of clearance strategies by the government. In the same category are the heavily armed traffic police that, depending on your point of view, through either a sense of entitlement or necessity for survival, supplement their meager salary through bribery from fictitious traffic violations. The outcome of such harsh scenarios leads to a feeling of vulnerability within the public realm that demotes equality of participation by all sectors of society. Aerial views, prominent in the work of Koolhaas, are tell-tale of the obstacles that abound when negotiating and travelling in Lagos. Experiencing the various stratifications of life there was only made possible through our ‘participation enablers’, such as the Chambers of Commerce, the Deputy Head of Mission from the Irish Embassy in Abuja, the Missionary NGOs and our faculty equivalents in Lagos. Architecturally, a common denominator between actual places that we could experience by foot was the typology of the courtyard building, the value of which becomes strikingly clear in such a hostile social and environmental climate.. In Alaba Market, the courtyard allows for a desirable ratio of floor space for the display of second-hand goods to the cost of surveillance. The atmosphere of order within the courtyard
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ESSAY / IRENE KELLY
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Alaba Market Photo by Irene Kelly
space of Alaba market represents a microcosm of city. The traders have banded together to provide services that they cannot rely on the government for such as electricity, water and security. Individual observations, which architects are tuned in to make on everyday activities, are symptomatic of bigger systems. On hearing about the ‘suitcase trade’ and seeing the evidence at the market it becomes clear as to why our luggage was delayed in arriving. A diagram entitled ‘Alaban Pangaea’ neatly sums up the phenomenon in the Harvard Project on the City.5 Geographical boundaries of continents are repressed and flights that are dependent on Free Trade destinations and specific products are made evident. Often the second hand products are broken down into parts and transported to Nigeria as passenger plane cargo, leaving little room for those on connecting flights. The courtyard was deployed in three other building types that we visited. Within the primary school6 it acted as a protected play space, while also as an arena for group performances. At the medical centre,7 built on cheap land bought from the nefarious Kirikiri prison, the courtyard creates a calm, introverted space, surrounded by naturally ventilated rooms. Unfortunately, in this instance the typology is compromised as a drug dispensing building was placed in its centre because of space constraints. The adult education centre8 is housed around a small scale courtyard where
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collected rainfall from the roof is used to create a contemplative garden. The cloister analogy works in making the task at hand less intimidating. The prevailing characteristic of each of these examples of courtyard is that they are removed from ‘relative space’, that is, unlike Luigi Snozzi’s courtyard of the school in Monte Carasso where the play-yard doubles as the local town square with one side open to the town, these courtyards are sealed to the public realm. In Lagos, the splintering of infrastructures to the scale of the individual/organisation is occurring due to lack of oversight from the top down. One major concession of everyday life in Lagos is the unpredictable nature of electrical supply from the Nigerian energy grid. A coping strategy, if they can afford it, is the rhizomatic presence of power generators among households. The effect on human settlements within the city is not only disagreeable in a sensorial manner through fumes, noise, and the local space consumption needed for these generators, but also economically, and by restricting possibilities of participation in a public realm once night falls. Profiting from our experiences between informal settlements and ‘urban negotiations’, i.e. art strategies that find possibilities to engage with real life issues, the intention is to create a secure space within an impoverished community that would be part of the public realm. This could simply
be a prototype that consists of a form of shelter that harnesses solar energy to create a stable environment for business to take place. It may simply be a stable internet connection point or simply the provision of artificial light that creates night-time space for small scale business to be carried out. Although a small-scale intervention, it would hold the potential to effect the scale, pattern and pace of this year’s UCD Architecture theme, ‘Landscape and Economy’ for a particular community. The next step, Phase Two, will entail generating collaboration between the three institutions, UCD, NCAD and UNILAG (University of Lagos) and the NGOs on the ground, to seek out what characteristics such a prototype should possess. It would be desirable that the locations of the prototype would lie within the existing infrastructural networks, as they hold a potential role in creating social collectivities through the ‘binding of space’,9 strengthening a sense of public realm. Fostering such network collaboration between the architectural students of the University of Lagos and the missionary NGO’s working at the human interface of urban crises10 would inevitably create a link between the thesis work of the students and the needs of the informal urban sector. In my mind there is a struggle to stop such socially conscious work being labelled as a form of philanthropy. Benefits, such as global connections, have to be seen by the local professionals and students
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to encourage their involvement. International expertise and global firms11 become an important alliance in this respect. We realise that such work is not a panacea for social problems in Lagos, however as Gandy claims, ‘it is only through commonalities which transcend emerging patterns of social, ethnic and religious polarisation that Lagos can begin the complex task of reconstruction and the development of new and legitimate modes of public administration’. A demonstration of this thought through an interventionist approach, manifesting in the creation of a stable space among an impoverished community, would be an empowering link in the chain. Lagos is a city primed for the urban acupuncture approach when it comes to masterplanning, as in the past it has experienced what Kenneth Frampton,12 on a recent visit to Dublin, called the ‘techno-scientific delusion’ of ‘The Masterplan’, conveying his mistrust that the guise of a Masterplan is often used as an inequitable tool for razing communities to the ground under the excuse of investment. In the near future we hope to be able to draw upon the remaining financial support and embark on Phases 2 and 3 to complete this objective. Further funding for the Programme of Strategic Cooperation between Irish Aid and Higher Education and Research Institutes 2007–2011 has been recently frozen, it is unknown if or when it will be resumed. This is an all too familiar story
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for our contact Professor Adebayo, Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Lagos. He talks of a housing study, commissioned by the government that was prematurely cut. Although beginning his description with the particular attributes that a site must hold, it is the lagosian euphemism for the ‘double loaded corridor’ that stays in my mind, ‘I face you, You face me’. The phrase calls to mind the current exhibition in the British Museum, ‘Kingdom of Ife’,13 where the sculptures of the city-state Ife, within present day Nigeria, were initially denied their African authorship because of the high level of refinement. The life-like sculptures and masks are displayed for vis-a-vis encounters with the public where even the folds of flesh are evident in the almost pure copper castings. ‘You face me, I face you’ also hints at neighbour accountability on a global scale, the essence behind the ‘Irish Aid and Higher Education and Research Institutes Programme.
ESSAY / IRENE KELLY
1 This title was assigned by Mick O’Kelly, NCAD, in the first Network Grant Application 2006/2007. 2 Koolhaas, Rem, AMO. Lagos: How It Works. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008. 3 Gandy, Matthew. Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crises Facing Metropolitan Lagos. Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, 371–396, February 2006. 4 Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1973. 5 p. 704. Koolhaas, Rem, AMO. Lagos: How It Works.
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Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008.
6 21st October visit to ‘Nazareth Primary School’ of 960 students. 7 23rd October visit to St Joseph’s Medical Centre, Kirikiri. 8 21st October Satellite Town, StAnnes’s Convent, Adult Education Classes.
9 Gandy, Matthew. Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crises Facing Metropolitan Lagos. Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, 371–396, final paragraph, February 2006. 10 No.2a of Final Report – Networking Grant, concerning the progress that has been made. 11 Lagos is on the C40, a list of forty cities that are part of the CCI, Clinton Climate Change Initiative. Arup London play a lead role in this project. 12 4th & 5th March 2010, Kenneth Frampton visiting critic to UCD. 13 4th March–6th June, Kingdom of Ife, Sculptures from West Africa, Exhibition at the British Museum.
Traintracks Photo by Irene Kelly
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LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
Object Study
Tutors Elizabeth Burns Sarah Cremin Miriam Delaney Tiago Faria Bill Hastings Merlo Kelly Ruth O’Herlihy Mark Price Peter Tansey
FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
Students Reem Al-Sabah Jack Baker Shauna Blanchfield Eamon Bolger Aileen Boylan Cillian Briody Sarah Browne Gareth Butler Lisa Callaghan John Campbell Sarah Carroll Meghan Carter Caryn Chan Eamonn Costello Robert Curley Jennifer Dodd Deirbhile Doddy Alanah Doyle Kevin Egan Marwa Elmubark Linda Fahy Oonagh Farrell Louise Finlayson Shane Fitzsimons Gemma Gallagher Eoin Gillen Marc Golden Fiona Gueunet Sean Hassett
Rachel Hoolahan Sean Hughes Naomi Hyland Gerard Keane Joanne Keenaghan Christina Kerr Louise McGarrigle Leisha McPartland Alan Meredith David Mulkeen Conor Murphy Michelle Murphy Grainne Nic Gearailt John Nolan David O’Mahony Darragh O’Shea Muireann O’Sullivan Hana Potisk Linda Prendergast Nicky Rackard Hannah Scaife Rosie Smallwood Clodagh Somers Cian Tarrant Johnny Steen Ailish Walker Alexandra Wallace David Zhao Gerda Ziemele
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Developing a way of sketching and drawing helps us think spatially. There are many ways to sketch. By learning aspects of drawing we can find our own way of sketching, and in doing so we can find our own way of understand and describing space. Through the study of an object, we develop and refine observational and analytical skills through drawing. This two week project was accompanied by a series of eight drawing workshops, and culminated in an exhibition and discussion of the work produced in the Red Room.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Workshops 1.
Observation through the Senses
5. Drawing Space: The object in context
2. Scale: Revealing an Image
6. Open
3. Introduction to Coloured Pencil
7.
4. Introduction to Collage
8. How is it made?: Components
Dissecting the Object: Orthographic projection
(opposite) Drawing utensils Gerda Ziemele
Analytical studies David Mulkeen
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
Awards
EVENTS / AWARDS
RIBA President’s Medal 2009 Graduate Paul Durcan was awarded a high commendation by the RIBA in their annual President’s Medal Student Awards, in the category of Part II Design Project. His thesis project sought to remake a piece of found ground in Dublin City through subtraction, by excavating and taking advantage of existing site conditions and pieces of city history which had been left behind. The building was considered not as a static object, but as a figure with a life of its own, which could be conveyed through its form, skin or use. The old theatre entrance on Longford Street was retained and stitched back into the fabric of both the place and the city. An existing boundary wall on Stephen Street was folded back into the site, allowing the fold to act as both an entrance and an address to the Georgian Townhouse opposite. This breathing space for both the house and street created new public ground in the city, partly sheltered by the overhanging studios and the foliage of several red birch trees. The programme was a bronze foundry consisting of a large courtyard and a series of workshops. The poche space contained at the centre of the block acted as workyard for the foundry, and breathing space for the programme and the city.
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UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
UCD Images of Research Fourth year student Jamie T. Young was a short-listed winner of the 2009 UCD ‘Images of Research’ Photography Competition.
Love Seat (pictured right) Shay Gallagher Iseult O’Cleary Martin Tiernan
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Exhibited at Kilkenny Crafts Gallery 2009, Irish Design Institute graduate design awards, Generation Show and Body and Soul Arena, Electric Picnic 2009.
Architects for Health Student design competition, UK, 2009 Iseult O’Cleary First Place
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Yard Sawmill, Timber drying and Education Rooms Slieve Bloom Mountains, County Offaly
Tutors Emmett Scanlon Andrew Clancy
Students Daniel Basquez Timothy Brick Lisa Cassidy Leonie Fitzgerald Ciara Grace Rachael Jennings Fergal Joyce Ralph Keane Enda Naughton Orla Philips Conor Rochford Paul Segault Deirdre Spring Gillian Brady Amelie Conway Patricia Gavin Dominic Lavelle Liam McInerney Beatrice Moran Paul O’Flynn
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Timberyard Photos by Dominic Lavelle
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LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
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Plan Dominic Lavelle
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Enclosure model study Dominic Lavelle
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
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Study models Dominic Lavelle
(opposite) Perspective of transit route Dominic Lavelle
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LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Landscape Journey Inn at Bunthulla Clonmacnoise, County Offaly
Tutors Mary Laheen Chris Boyle
Students Elizabeth Burns Katy Giblin Aideen Hannon David Hannon Eoin Horner Claire McMenamin Niamh Murphy Donncha O’Brien Blathmhac O’Muiri Hugh Queenan Sean Schoales Stefan Storz Su Wang Joanne Lyons Iseult O’Cleary Aoiffe O’Kelly Tapologo Odubeng Kevin Quinlan Joseph Swan Richard Yates
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Site photo Joe Swan
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(above) Section through vegetable gardens (left) Site strategy plan (right) Units study plan Joe Swan
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
(above) Unit model (left) Envelope drawing Joe Swan
(opposite) Joe Swan presenting at Year 5 reviews Photo by Stephen Tierney
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
EVENTS / SEMINARS / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4
Research & Innovation Seminars
Seminar Groups 2009–10 Space Framed – Hugh Campbell and Alice Clancy ‘A’ is for ‘Architecture’, ‘B’ is for ‘Building’... – Kevin Donovan
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Spatial Cultures: What we talk about when we talk about space – Kevin Donovan and Declan Long (NCAD) Over-sight/site/cite/cité – Irene Kelly Building, Dwelling, Eating – Samantha Martin-McAuliffe Paranoia and Architecture – Samantha Martin-McAuliffe Urban and Landscape Studies – John Olley The Interior Prospect – Stephen Tierney
As part of the Upper School course, students participate in a specific research and innovation seminar group. Seminar groups are run by a variety of teaching staff, each of whom establish the territory which will initially form the subject matter for group reading and discussion amongst the group. Each student is ultimately asked to complete a written dissertation. (opposite) Space Framed Seminar
‘A’ is for Architecture new London Gazetteer
Photo by Alice Clancy
Alex Crean
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LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
Building, Dwelling, Eating
EVENTS / SEMINARS / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4
Archaeology of Dublin’s Food Culture
There are scores of buildings and places in Dublin that have their origins in the culture of food and drink. The Guinness Brewery might come to mind as a primary
Fergal Joyce Year 4
example. However, many of these places have been forgotten or abandoned. Or, over time, their meaning has changed to the degree that they no longer resemble their original use; only traces remain. The task for this project was to ‘uncover’ one of these forgotten places in Dublin’s food culture. Students decided on a site, visited and documented it through photos, video and drawings, etc. They each wrote a succinct essay introducing the site, its history and present day condition. What follows is an essay written by one student.
When asked to examine a place in Dublin with a connection to food, one only has to look at a map of the modern day city to find places with names like Cornmarket, Lamb Alley, Bull Alley Street, Newmarket Street and Cook Street. Jumping off the map, in among these streets in the oldest part of Dublin, is the building that I chose to uncover – the Iveagh Markets. Nestled between antique-famous Francis Street to the west and the much quieter Lamb Alley to the east, the building runs the length of Dean Swift Square to the south in the workingclass area of the Liberties. The building’s location is interesting in that it is just outside the Old Medieval City Wall, close to the modern day city centre and the busy tourist trap of the Cathedral district. Was the location of the markets so close to the old city wall as important as it may seem? One wonders. On examining this part of the city in the first Ordnance Survey map from 1847, the street layout is somewhat different, with more closely compacted buildings and only a hint of the streets that were to become Lamb Alley and Dean Swift Square. The site
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of the building itself shows an imposing U-shaped Brewery connected solely to Francis Street. A revised map showing the area in 1939 shows the Iveagh Markets in its full glory, dominating the surrounding neighbourhood and creating a retailing focal point. I believe that the market was especially famous for fish selling, but one wonders what else exactly was sold on the premises. Does the fact that Lamb Alley borders one side have any bearing on the produce sold here? Was there any connection left to the brewery? A present day investigation shows the building layout exactly the same as it was one hundred years ago, however the roles have reversed, with the markets overshadowed by, in my opinion, thoughtless, modern day high-rise apartment blocks and ever-widening streets to cope with growing traffic passing through the area. A clay pipe factory and fair green are also reported to have been on the site at some time in ‘Plan’. The Markets were designed by Frederick G. Hicks, and built by the Iveagh Trust for the first Earl of Iveagh, Sir Edward C. Guinness, son of Benjamin Lee Guinness in 1907. O’Brien in ‘Dublin: a grand tour’ says that “the design of the Iveagh Market looks backwards to Palladio with its arcaded front and Classical pediment”. With regard to the people involved in its construction, the names Iveagh and Guinness are significant in referring to the world
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
famous brewery nearby; indeed the markets were one of a number of schemes made possible by the enormous success of the Guinness family. It may seem ironic that the location of the markets housed another brewery in competition with Guinness in the 1800s! Aalen writes in ‘The Iveagh Trust’ that the street vendors who were displaced by developments around Patrick Street and Patrick’s Close “demanded that market rights should be secured” leading to the “enclosed market house on Francis Street... for the sale of old clothes, vegetables and fish”. I believe this to be around the turn of the twentieth century before the markets were built. It was claimed by the Dublin Temperance Movement that “Lord Iveagh was acting in his own interests... giving the Dublin poor a place to sell their last rags so as to enable them to go out and by more of his stout” according to O’Brien. This area was connected to other parts of the country at the beginning of the twentieth century by the nearby Grand Canal, which ended in a basin nearby off Marrowbone Lane. As well as probably serving the Markets and surrounding factories, it connected the rest of the country with the enormous Guinness brewery. As the canals were without doubt the most important mode of transport at the time, the location is significant in
that it was accessible to the country from which produce came and was also accessible to the huge residential community in the area.Indeed locals commenting on the markets online reminisce, “I miss the smell of the fish LOL”… “Ah, the smell of the fish…the Iveagh Market Appreciation Society”…“I wonder is there still a smell of fish?” The present day condition of the site is unfortunately a sorry sight, plagued with carefully crushed and stowed drink cans, ever growing weeds and a forgotten feeling looms from the moment you leave the bustling Cornmarket with dozens of bus tours and lively Liberties locals. I think this building fell out of use as a result of different factors in the way the country changed at the height of the Celtic Tiger. The onslaught of multiple supermarket chains and discount retailers, a growing snobbery and laziness among us in relation to our habits of buying food, and a change in the population of the area all led to the demise of the markets as the central retail space of the vicinity. An ambitious plan to redevelop the site was put forward by developer Martin Keane in 2000 at the height of Ireland’s boom. He himself had a keen interest in the site saying “From the time I was very young I used to go up to the Iveagh market to buy fish on Friday and I liked the whole ambiance of the area but in particular I really liked that building”.
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Fortunately the scheme never went ahead, and the “glazed street” and “five star hotel” never came to fruition. Although Keane had good intentions in mind with Boston’s Quincy market and London’s Covent Garden as inspiration, the delay may prove beneficial in ensuring that the redevelopment of the site will be carefully considered. Hopefully this forgotten gem of the Dublin food scene will be reborn some day in the near future as a market once again. Bibliography Aalen, F.H.A. The Iveagh Trust: The First Hundred Years, 1890–1990.Dublin: Iveagh Trust, 1990. Dublin.ie Forums: Dublin’s Neighbourhoods – have your say on a local issue! – South West Inner City – Iveagh Market. http://www.dublin.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=3353 (accessed 27th September, 2009) Dublin’s Iveagh Market revamp – Plan 2, (February/March, 2000): 14–15. O’Brien, Jacqueline. Dublin: a grand tour. Abrams, 1994.
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Cookery School & Gardens St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Stephen Tierney Students Su Wang Raukura Turei John Crowley Patrick Phelan Brian Massey Schoales, Sean Donnacha O’Brien Eoin Horner David Walsh Enda Naughton
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65 (left) Site strategy (opposite) Model of building and gardens Patrick Phelan Photo by Alice Clancy
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
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(opposite) Plans of Cookery School (above) Strategic site section Patrick Phelan
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
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(left) Interior perspective
(above)
(opposite)
Site Model
Plans
John Crowley
John Crowley
Photo by Alice Clancy
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Work-Space
Tutors John Parker Prof. Hugh Campbell
Students Shea Gallagher Patricia Gavin Tapologo Odubeng
Work-Space seeks to explore the architecture of contemporary non-hierarchical, un-programmed space for use principally by tertiary industry – the environment of the workplace. Despite its ubiquity within the built fabric, it has, in recent times, remained marginal to debate and innovation within architecture. The group seeks to consider ways in which the contemporary workplace might be examined afresh, its spatial composition, character and atmosphere, the rituals and patterns of activity it engenders and the relationships established with a wider context. Initial collective work carried out by the students ranged from observations of the pragmatic appropriation of domestic Georgian Dublin for modern workspace to explorations of corporate organization of the collective as found in the Central Beheer, Apeldoorn. (H. Hertzberger, 1978). From this work individual theses were developed.
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Early interest in strategic organizing systems such as PREVI, Lima led Shea Gallagher to examine the potential application of similar systems for the making of new ‘workplace communities’. The impact of globalization on Irish Cities, in particular Limerick, is the context for the thesis, where ‘top-down’ promotion of multi-national industry by the IDA combined with the transient nature of such corporations has had a devastating impact on communities dependent on direct investment. Shea seeks to establish an architecture that might foster a more resilient model, accommodating clusters of small indigenous businesses. The shell of the former Dell factory in Raheen, Limerick provides the framework for this exploration.
(opposite left) 1:100 Model (opposite right) Conceptual Model Shea Gallagher
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LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
(left) Archive/site montage image (right) Site strategy model Patricia Gavin
72 Patricia Gavin creates a world of dialogue as a means of exploring the working environment of a regional newspaper – between past and present; between city and landscape; between the creation of ‘news’ and its long-term storage. A pocket of land on the periphery of Mullingar, trapped between the railway and canal, is the selected site. The brief is a town archive and newspaper office. The project draws on such diverse sources as the installations of Christian Boltanski and the divided form of The Carpenter Centre, Harvard, as precedents in the exploration of the ‘ordinary’ of office space and the ‘extraordinary’ inherent in an archive.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
(left) Oriel Chambers (right) 1:100 Model Tapologo Odubeng
73 Tapologo Odubeng focuses his interest on the making of the well-tempered environment with a specific interest in office space. He asks the question – ‘How might one make an architecture informed principally by such concerns as air, daylight, comfort’? The thesis is an investigation of typology, tempered by an exploration as to how type is modified by site, in this case, the confines of the banks of the Grand Canal, Baggot Street. The elegance of 19th century precedents such as Oriel Chambers, Liverpool (Peter Ellis, 1864) studied through large-scale models, sets the ambition for the thesis and the methodology of large-scale study models facilitates investigation into the tectonics of the proposition.
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Brut
Tutors Peter Tansey John McLaughlin
Students Dara Farrell Joe Mackey Liam McInerney Brendan Ward
The intention in the group is to find fresh design responses and valid architectural expression while escaping accepted conventions and normative responses. We see this flawless, true expression in nature, but it can also be seen in cultural production – in critical art, in the impulse of much music, both modern or ancient. A discussion on contemporary culture was prompted by some 20th century texts on art, society and architecture. This focused on aspects of the contemporary social contract, between individual and society and as to whether our institutions appropriately express or give form to this relationship. The group’s work a collection of investigations into programmes or places that have either been pushed to the margins of society, choose to be there, or are sited there. In Foucault’s terms, a collection of heterotopias; places disengaged from the typical social flows of our cities, towns and landscapes. By starting with programme – taking it apart, examining the parts and their inherent conventions, challenging underlying assumptions, we can re-programme buildings to work better.
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We must call on things and let them unfold their own forms. It goes against our nature to impose forms on them, to determine them from without, to force upon them laws of any kind, to dictate to them. —Hugo Haring
Liam McInerney’s thesis opens with a concern for the dysfunctional typology of the nursing home. The study explores the typology in general and also a specific nursing home in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. An urban analysis of the town shows a dissipated urban life and the dereliction at its hollowed out centre. Breaking down and re-configuring the functions of the existing nursing home, located outside of the town, he re-casts pieces to graft back into vacant lots in the town’s centre.
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75 Connection
The relocating of cemeteries outside our cities has
Site in city
Liam McInerney
reduced the relationship and awareness of, death in our
Dara Farrell
daily lives. Locating a cemetery on the river’s edge at the Mardyke in Cork city, Dara Farrell’s thesis investigates commemorative space and the ritual of city burial as an active part of its cultural infrastructure. It forms the central piece of an urban parkland, that incorporates sports and leisure facilities.
LANDSCAPE & PRODUCTION
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
(left) Book of spatial hybrids Joe Mackey
(opposite left) Inishlacken site drawing (opposite right) Hut sketch Brendan Ward
76 Joe Mackey’s interest in the codes at play in built space opens up an exploration into theatre. Tailored for Macnas at their current workshop site in Galway, the project opens up gaps between the masks and the masked, forming a layered space and revealing a labyrinth of connections and associations embedded in the programme and site.
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77 The selection of the remote, disconnected island of Inishlacken, in Connemara provides Brendan Ward with a platform to investigate our connection with elemental space/ landscape. Through the programme of an artists’ retreat the thesis explores edge space as a place of reflection and of work.
LANDSCAPE
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
& ARCHÆOLOGY Augustinian Priory at Kells, Co. Kilkenny Photo by Stephen Tierney
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
PROJECT FOCUS / TOM HOLBROOK
Tom Holbrook, 5th Studio The Lea River Park
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Tom Holbrook Photo by Stephen Tierney
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
The Lea River Park will be a major new park for London, created by the transformation of a working landscape into a new public space. The park centres on the River Lea, the meanders of which link all its key spaces. Since London’s establishment, the valley has been a provisioning ground for the city. The Lea River Park is conceived of as a Cornucopia – a place that explores, humanises and celebrates the systems that support the city. Over the next decade an additional 40,000 new dwellings are anticipated, which, together with the 2012 London Olympic games, completely change the valley context. Existing deficiencies in public open space in the area will become more acute – so a new park, fully integrated into the urban fabric that surrounds it, is a necessity not a luxury. The strategy established for the Lea River Park is therefore not solely addressing issues of landscape – but also of urbanism – the park must guide and set the context for new development in the valley. The Lea Valley is an extraordinary landscape structure, uniquely connecting the centre of a world city to its surrounding greenbelt. Once the Lea River Park and the Olympic Legacy Park are complete, a 26-mile parkland journey will be possible between the Thames and mid-Hertfordshire. After years of marginal use the valley is now the centre of the UK’s largest regeneration project. As the spine of the London-Stansted-Cambridge-
Peterborough growth area, the focus is now on how the Lea, and the regional park around it, directs and marshals high quality developmental change. The relationship between the built environment and the landscape in the valley has been incidental at best: as land use intensifies it is necessary to develop a clear ambition for how the uniqueness of the landscape structure can contribute to developing a set of richly varied and successful places along the valley. The park development is being led by the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation, in partnership with the Design for London and the LDA, the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, and the London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham. It is one of the Mayor’s Great Spaces and is part of the East London Green Grid.
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The Design Framework The Design Framework has established a commonly shared vision and set of objectives between a wide range of partners. The Design Framework for the park provides the overarching vision, including strategies for land acquisition. The framework informs delivery of each site, which will be via diverse means, from individual site masterplans to design coding for new development bordering the park.
Masterplans often suffer from acting as an end in themselves, being too prescriptive or too vague and becoming rapidly out of date and irrelevant. Recognising that the Lea River Park is a complex project that will take many years to come together, we have established a way of describing the park which is resilient and that has the ability to absorb change, failure of parts, and inevitable future shifts in focus or funding. The Design Framework frames a generous polemic about what the Lea River Park is. Its foundation is a rich understanding of an extraordinary place – the Lower Lea Valley – described as a physical topography in an historical and cultural context. Taking this place-orientated description, the framework then goes on to describe what sort of public space would work in particular areas – what qualities there are to work with and draw out, what future possibilities there are to help a variety of appropriate parklands emerge. Critically, we have not imagined a parkland space that exists in spite of development around it, but one that leads and makes demands on the new development in this area of growth. Planned infrastructure in the valley is not seen as a threat, but as an opportunity to create very particular park spaces, for example: the Crossrail project presents the opportunity for a new picnicking hill, using excavated spoil, overlooking the Thames.
PROJECT FOCUS / TOM HOLBROOK
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
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‘Siegetower’ Connection at Twelvetrees Crescent Bridge 5th Studio
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
‘Volcano’ – picnicking hill created by spoil from Crossrail 5th Studio
Phase one The Fatwalk is the primary project in the realisation of the Lea River Park. It will connect between the Thames and the Lee Valley Regional Park at Hackney Marshes. The first phase of works to create the Lea River Park is underway and £28m (€31m) of funding has been allocated to the project by the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation. A substantial portion of this funding is to establish a continuous Fatwalk route as the backbone of the future park and is therefore directed at addressing physical severances and obstructions – establishing a route connection at Bow Locks, a new crossing over the Lea at Poplar Reach and a means of crossing beneath the A13 flyover near Canning Town.
83 Out of Strength Comes Sweetness These early pieces of infrastructure are regarded as catalysts for converting what is currently land used for gas storage, sewage pumping and transport infrastructure into diverse park spaces of the Lea River Park: turning what is an industrial backwater into the foreground of a new public space which people can start to access, use and enjoy. After the Olympic Games, the Fatwalk will engage with the
central concourse of the Olympic Park, ensuring continuity between the two park areas in a continuous but changing environment. This new connective parkland is called the Fatwalk to emphasise that it is a place in itself rather than just a connection between points. It should be negotiable by many modes of transport – the unwieldiness of a horse and rider we have used as a rule of thumb.
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
PROJECT FOCUS / TOM HOLBROOK
(left)
Tom Holbrook is a founding-director of 5th Studio. He trained at the
Mill Meads, restored watermeadow
University of Cambridge and Kingston Polytechnic, London. 5th Studio
through the Thames Tideway project
was formed in 1997. The practice aims to balance practical ‘making’
(right)
skills with conceptual understanding of the issues at hand: the large
New River Crossing at Poplar Reach
scale of strategic planning with the particularity of carefully made
5th Studio
architectural space. Recent work at 5th Studio includes leading on the Lea River Park Design Framework (International Urban Landscape Silver Award) and the Creative Exchange building in St Neots (finalist for the Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award). Tom is currently directing work on a number of Olympic Fringe Legacy projects in East London, from masterplanning through to building scale, and the design of spaces for innovation in Cambridge.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Lunchtime Lecture Series
Lectures 11th September 2009
Dr. Daniel Tietzsch-Tyler, Archaeological and Historical Illustrator In 2009–10, visiting critics coming to review student work in each studio were also invited to present their work in the Red Room as part of a lunchtime lecture series.
25th September 2009
Peter Salter, Architect 5th November 2009
Aurelio Galfetti, Architect 20th November 2009
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Stephen Bates, Sergison Bates Architects 1st December 2009
Tom Holbrook, 5th Studio Architecture 26th February 2010
Jan Olav Jensen, Jensen & Skodvin Arkitektkontor 4th March 2010
Kenneth Frampton, Architectural Historian and Critic 5th March 2010
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Architects 20th May 2010
Edward Jones, Dixon Jones Architects
St Brendan’s Cathedral site, Ardfert, Co. Kerry c. 1080 from Reconstruction Drawings ‘Historic Buildings from Ruin to Revisualization’ by Dr Daniel Tietzsch-Tyler, MAAIS MIAI
FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
Space in the City
Each space is a fragment of the city, a small part of the overall plan. This study sought to investigate what makes it what it is, to observe how a space is formed, what contains it, the ground, walls, columns, ceiling, structure, materials, atmosphere… The project was collaborative; students worked in groups of four to observe, investigate, measure, draw and carry out a critical analysis of a given space in the city.
Space and sites studied A Merchants Arch at Wellington Quay/Crampton Quay
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B Boardwalk just up-river from Halfpenny Bridge C Public Space to North of Halfpenny Bridge D Entrance to Powerscourt Town House, off South William Street
E Entrance to South City Markets, off Drury Street F Way through Stag’s Head at Dame Street G Side Entrance and foyer of Bank of Ireland (formerly The Houses of Parliament) at Westmorland Street H Dublin Castle Steps, off Castle Street I Steps and Portico of Dublin City Hall J Cow’s Lane, Temple Bar K Entrance to The Kildare Street Club, corner of Nassau and Kildare St. L Entrance to Eason’s, corner of Nassau and Dawson St. M Entrance to Trinity College at Nassau Street, from footpath to entrance N Entrance to Trinity College at College Green
Model Study of Bank of Ireland Entrance Hall John Nolan
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Plan of Portico and Entrance Hall, Parliament Building, College Green John Nolan
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
Threshold Section, Parliament Building, College Green John Nolan
(opposite) Erasmus Group Meal, Year 4 Photo by Stephen Tierney
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LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 1
Archaeological Survey St Mullins Co. Carlow
(opposite) Site Plan Group Collaboration
Groupwork Survey Photo by Ronan Kenny
Tutors Chris Boyle Andrew Clancy Peter Cody Marcus Donaghy Bill Hastings Mary Laheen Deirdre Mckenna Colm Moore Sheila O’Donnell Emmett Scanlon Stephen Tierney
Students Daniel Basquez Timothy Brick Elizabeth Burns Lisa Cassidy Claire Chawke Ciaran Conlon Peter Cosgrave Alexander Creane John Crowley Sean Finegan Leonie Fitzgearld Joe Flood Katy Giblin Edin Gicevic Ciara Grace Aideen Hannon David Hannon Carla Hayes Eoin Horner Alison Hyland Rachael Jennings
Fergal Joyce Ralph Keane Ronan Kenny Elspeth Lee Cillian Magee Brian Massey Patrick McGrath Claire McMenamin Padraig McMorrow Steven McNamara Conor Morrissey Eoin Murphy Niamh Murphy Kieran Murray Enda Naughton Roisin Ni Bhuadain Aisling Ni Dhonnchu Aine Nic an Riogh Donncha O’Brien Luke O’Callaghan Blathmhac O Muiri
Patrick Phelan Orla Philips Hugh Queenan Conor Rochford Emilie Rigal Patrick Roche Ekaterina Samodurova Cian Scanlon Sean Schoales Paul Segault Enida Skalonjic Deirdre Spring Patrick Stack Lena Steinbuch Ruth Stewart Stefan Storz Robert Tobin Raukura Turei Su Wang James Young Anna Zabiegala
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 1
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93 (right) Survey drawing – Temple na Bo Group Collaboration
(left) Existing Remains – Temple na Bo Photo by Jamie T. Young
(opposite) Survey Drawing – The Abbey Group Collaboration
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
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(above & opposite) Exhibition of Archaeological Survey, Survey work in progress at the Round Tower, St Mullins
St Mullins in Memorial Hall
Photo by Ronan Kenny
Photos by Su Wang and Jamie T. Young
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Ecology
Tutors Marcus Donaghy James O’Hare
Students Eimear Hanratty Joanne Lyons Richard Yates
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The tutorial group ‘ecology’ explores the relationships between forms and underlying processes in architecture. The research is conducted by dwelling on the patterns observable at various scales of engagement – attempting to elucidate the mechanisms that are embodied in architecture. Close observation and wild speculation are spun together in projects, drawing on origins without presupposing form. This year’s work is comprised of projects as follows:
Eimear Hanratty’s project ‘Clockwork’ is
elements and movement at various scales.
for a gymnasium. Reaching for the root of
The building stands into and against its
gymnastics, embedding the given brief into
context negotiating between the instrumental
the river cliff of Collooney extending links
registers of equipment and dimension,
into a concatenated sequence founded on
landscape and travel, town and topography.
movement cross-stream (tra-ghetto) from the
The project lays bare these relationships
train station over the mill workings to the main
through the play of gym at the joint,
street of the town. The project articulates
harmonizing, between town and hinterland.
place, creating a joint between local/fixed
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
97 (opposite) ‘Clockwork’ conceptual drawing (right) Site plan and section Eimear Hanratty
LANDSCAPE & ARCHÆOLOGY
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Raised from an interest in layering, mille-feuille
the interface of limestone and shale along
and the gaps that connect the leaves of pastry,
the southern rim of karst, in a territory where
Joanne Lyons’ thesis ‘FARM House’ is played
springs rise and mineral soil is mixed. The
out through overlay, rubbings and cuttings of
project of a farmhouse sets out from hearth
layers: landscape not a passive palimpsest
and cross-wall, an extension from something
but living and disruptive; embracing the
previous: dwelling constructed from materials
laying down, eruptions and overturnings of
to hand: masonry; maturing spruce plantations;
geological time. Patterns of inhabitation are
planted and pioneer birch, alder and hazel;
studied in the transhumant Burren landscape.
growth cut back in rotation from the under
A chain of tower houses is mapped as settled
grazed pasture of limestone uplands. Dwelling
in the ecotone borne by productive soil at
as a means of landscape conservation.
(above) Landscape Interface Model (left) Public space mapping Joanne Lyons
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Richard Yates’ work ‘Autonomy’ is positioned
introduced from maritime cultures all along
(above)
between Rossi’s thoughts on the autonomy
the North Atlantic rim. The building sits on
Museum Long Hall Section
of Architecture as a discipline and related
the hard between the shoulder of Rennie’s
(left)
precedent studies of buildings developed
west pier and the sands of the isthmus to
Layered Cross Section
by ‘intention’. The thesis navigates between
the mainland. The project grows out of the
Richard Yates
taxonomic and functional sub-division
littoral, the amplitude of structure set to
of type and model, between the absolute
accommodate the vessels exhibited, the roof
and contingent. The place is Howth, the
developed to shelter, light, and shade the
programme a Maritime museum. The
collection. The formation of plan and section
collection is made from the inventory of
negotiates between autonomous models and
Irish traditional boats linked locally in their
the contingencies of programme and place.
evolution and crossed with improvements
LANDSCAPE
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
& INFRASTRUCTURE Site plan of Massy’s Wood, Military Road Seamus Guidera & Eleanor Duignan
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
ESSAY / WILL DIMOND
The Military Road
bear·ing (ber΄iŋ) • supporting, carrying load
Will Dimond
• direction relative to one’s own position • awareness or recognition of one’s position or situation
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Military Road Photo by Conor McGowan
Built by several hundred soldiers with shovels and picks using local materials the Military Road was constructed between 1800 and 1809 to provide rapid access for occupying forces between Dublin and the heartland of the Wicklow Mountains. It is unique in Ireland as a substantial piece of defensive transport infrastructure. It comprises a roadway, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, over mainly mountainous terrain for a distance of some 60 kilometres, punctuated by garrisons at intervals of a day’s march for billeting soldiers. It offered armies a mode of defence by facilitating proactive incursion on the North-South axis into difficult and varied terrain that was otherwise only accessible at certain points via East-West routes crossing the Wicklow Mountains. Unlike the familiar military infrastructure of forts, docks, barracks and the like, its status as a public roadway has ensured a diverse history determined by the civil exigencies of commerce,
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
private landowners and local authorities. Less than a year after commencement of construction the potential of the road as a conduit for developing commerce and tourism had been noted.1 From the moment of its completion the fact of its existence meant that the military objective of neutralising the wilderness of Wicklow was already fulfilled, and its use for military purposes thereafter was sporadic. It has undergone transformation (it received its metalled surface in the mid twentieth century) and phases of dereliction and disrepair (one section re-routed soon after construction and subsequently overcome by forest). The development of parallel lowland routes into major transport arteries effectively short-circuited its value as a long distance route for other than recreational purposes. The proximity of the capital city, however, ensured that the road also drew local traffic, those making short forays into the landscape for pleasure or escape and some who continue to work the raised bog for fuel. When travelling by car the topography of the city edge here is such that countryside confronts you suddenly, demanding an instant mood shift. The Military Road provides a special opportunity not only to access the wildernesses of Wicklow directly for city dwellers, but also to explore the nature of landscape and our role in shaping it. A moment of military history provided the spark that brought about this
massive deployment of men and materials. The resulting piece of infrastructure had a significance unforeseen by its makers. It provides rich territory for us to come to understand landscape systems and how they might be maintained and inhabited. What is the function of the road in our reading of this territory? At the broader scale the road is a marker, providing a datum from which and against which to view the landscape. Of equal importance to the access route is its function in providing a series of fixed points from which to survey the complex and constantly changing forms of land, vegetation, water and sky that together constitute landscape.2 Man’s physical constructs form a counterpoint to this. In the process of two-dimensional mapping the act of overlaying route on contour immediately enhances one’s understanding of the topography and lie of the land. In three-dimensional space the line of the road provides the traveller with a structuring device with which to gauge his or her own mental map of the context, a way of ‘organising’ the landscape and deriving a reading of scale and orientation, a way of taking bearings. This road traverses a variety of landscapes from city edge through wooded hillside to blanket bog, post-glacial lake and river glen, to mountain pass. Its construction required ingenuity in the deployment of engineering and materials over varying ground and topography, tempered (as
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always in projects of this scale) by the imperative of economy. As a construct it was tailored by the limitations of those wielding hand tools, and relying on horsedrawn cart and wheelbarrow for transportation. Each section is determined by the availability of locally sourced materials and their suitability for the particular ground conditions. In this sense the road may be understood in the same way as a building construction project – infrastructure as building. Adolf Loos’ treatise on building in the mountains springs to mind for his focus on the wisdom of traditional construction deriving primarily from response to environment: Do not build in a picturesque manner. Leave such effects to the walls, the mountains and the sun. A person who dresses to be picturesque is not picturesque but looks like an oaf. The farm labourer does not dress to be picturesque. But he is.3
There is a beauty in this construction project that becomes apparent after a little digging (like the iceberg nine tenths is hidden). The road is made up of parts of the site re-constituted and reassembled to form a resilient but flexible structure capable of bearing the forces of use, weather and time;4 through judicious plotting to take the most economical line, where possible by following contours, major engineering works were minimised, thereby avoiding cuttings and viaducts; granite was
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
sourced en route, evidenced by the series of small quarries left behind; bridges took the shortest span or piers were introduced, allowing granite slabs to be used, avoiding the need to construct arches with their requisite centering; over bog landscape an understanding of hydraulics, groundwater and surface water was exploited, the groundworks extending to some 30 metres in width (for a 4 metre wide roadway) in order to incorporate a broad network of drains with culverts and bridges at streams; the road base was floated off rows of logs or bundles of rushes bound together, all of which continue to function today.5 A lesson, it might be said, in sustainable building design where performance, buildability and economy are the key criteria unencumbered by the tyranny of appearance. Odd, then, that the Military Road today is undervalued, even neglected. Amid miles of spectacularly beautiful upland heath the road surface is poorly maintained and suffering degradation, junctions are unmarked, stopping places obstructed with barriers and devoid of facilities. There is no sense of the road as a place to stop and engage with landscape, only to move onward. No sense of ownership nor of value. Not unlike other forms of landscape infrastructure in Ireland (canals, rivers, quays), the mountain road commands a certain position of indifference in the national psyche. The poet Michael Longley
ESSAY / WILL DIMOND
conjectured recently that Ireland had lost that sense of reliance on the landscape as a sustaining force, an outcome of catastrophic famine in the nineteenth century.6 Meanwhile, in the wilds of Norway, architects Jensen Skodvin have shown in exemplary fashion in their Mountain Roads Projects how judicious interventions in infrastructure can foster a reconnection with the landscape and in doing so raise awareness of the need to tread softly. Stopping places are provided at strategic locations along a mountainous roadway. Their interventions employ familiar materials such as rope, timber, steel, stone which constitute a small anchor or reference point in the natural wilderness, a place to rest and observe. Deployment of materials is sparse with minimal impact on the site, but effected with extreme care. The interface between man and landscape is expressed by the insertion of a protective layer or wearing course at strategic points of contact, ‘bearings’ in both the engineering and the geographical sense. Natural materials overtly crafted, sited to exploit the sounds, smells and sense of exposure of the upland landscape. The visitor is lured into an intensified relationship with place, with the physical, sensual, material landscape, seduced by sensations of permanence and tactility. In this relationship, confronted with the permanence of Norway’s mountains, one’s
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sense of the ephemeral nature of the environment is heightened and the visitor understands the wisdom of the stone path. Of the few construction projects underway in Ireland in this economic vacuum the majority are new roads projects. They are not about accessing the landscape, but are exclusively major national arteries connecting urban centres where the economic payback is deemed to be more demonstrable (commerce is sacrosanct, even where this entails building roads in culturally and archaeologically sensitive ground). In these times it must be particularly relevant to re-evaluate the legacy of an era where there was an extraordinary investment in social and cultural infrastructure. Four landscapes In this context the second and third year students in UCD School of Architecture embarked on a study of the Military Road, to record and understand its varied landscapes, and to determine an appropriate way in which to approach this terrain. There was a broad awareness that the landscape surrounding our cities had a special character, and provided continuity and relief, a counterpoint to urban density. Contained within it were deep cultural resonances. Its potential for recreation and for education was enormous.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
The Military Road passes through dramatically diverse landscapes within a short distance of the city. Four different types of terrain were identified as a basis for this study for record and analysis work with a view to exposing the historical layering of this landscape. These were as follows: Suburban Edge Sparsely wooded river valley with millponds and residual light industrial buildings, recent flood alleviation mechanisms and the massive intrusion of motorway flyover infrastructure and embankments. Woodland Hillside Quite dense mixed woodland with public access, including derelict infrastructure of former demesne, walled gardens and outhouses etc. Old estate structures as well as the roadway of the original Military Road now invaded by trees and undergrowth.
The students carried out projects recording and analysing these connected landscapes, and subsequently proposed interventions at a range of sites contiguous with the road. A common thread emerged relating to difficulty of access; subsequent activity or ownership had resulted in an altered relationship between the road and adjacent ground. Group survey work revealed evidence of existing structures and vestiges of former occupancies now all but erased, along with physical manifestations of current usage.7 Armed with these findings individual design projects were proposed. The aim of this work was to re-evaluate the terrain of the Military Road, and to intimate how architects might ultimately broaden the possibilities for inhabitation of this landscape and render it more accessible to contemporary visitors.
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1 ‘By means of this road there will not only be an easy and ready access for the army, to preserve the peace and quiet of adjacent districts, but there will be an opening to Enterprise and Capital to speculate in cultivating these at present uninhabited wilds, and to ornament the many beautiful lakes and valleys, which abound in this extensive region.’ Robert Fraser General View of the Agriculture and Minerology of County Wicklow, Dublin 1801 2 Jan Olav Jensen – lecture at UCD, 25th February 2010, talked of “landscape as chaos”, man’s role being to make sense of this chaos. 3 Adolf Loos – Rules for Those Building in the Mountains – Jahrbuch der Scwarzwald’schen Schulanstallen, 1913 4 The site for a road being long, the builders had access to a relatively broad range of materials. Whilst granite was available in different forms along much of its length, large pieces for spanning streams were only available from a quarry at the Rathfarnham end, and could be transported along the site as completion of the different sections progressed. 5 See Michael Fewer The Wicklow Military Road – History and Topography Dublin 2007 pp 88–91. 6 Observation based on reading of work of John McGahern: “many
Bogland Plateau Open heath raised bog with distant views in most directions. Remains of extensive peat workings with continuing occupancy.
Irish people have lost their trust in nature”. Michael Longley, lecture on The West – University College Dublin, 1st February 2010. 7 For example, turf cutting activity on the raised bog continues. Some open cuttings conceal temporary shelters built from recycled materials, and the use of recycled domestic heating radiators as
Upland River Valley Upland heath gives way to river glen with grazing land. Small settlement at junction of roads, including former military barracks.
footbridges across trenches.
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Mapping of Territory Military Road Rathfarnham Castle, County Dublin to Aghavannagh, County Wicklow
Tutors Wendy Barrett Gerry Cahill Alice Clancy Kevin Donovan Fiona Hughes Anne Gorman Orla Murphy Michael Pike James Rossa O’Hare Will Dimond Eileen Fitzgerald Irene Kelly John-Barry Lowe John Parker
MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
A Building and its Landscape: Tearmann Analytical Studies of the Military Road The identity of Ireland has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. We find ourselves suddenly in uncharted economic territory. The development of buildings and infrastructure has all but ceased in our cities and towns and long-fought-for community structures seem to be under threat through uncertainty and scarcity of funding. In these times the landscape surrounding our cities provides a sense of continuity, welcome relief from urban density. The landscape constitutes an extensive cultural and recreational resource.
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Rockbrook Section Group Collaboration
This project sought to take advantage of the economic vacuum to investigate a section of landscape stretching from the fringes of Dublin, deep into the wilds of the Wicklow Mountains. The Military Road was constructed between 1800 and 1809 to provide access into the heartland of the Wicklow landscape during very different times. It traverses a variety of landscapes from city edge through wooded hillside to blanket bog, post-glacial lake and river glen.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Working collaboratively in groups students explored various sections of the Military Road, recording and making studies of the particular nature of each site, making observations about the terrain, ground conditions, aspect, environment and character of the place. The project was supplemented by workshop presentations from Orla Murphy on ‘Mapping’, Gerry Cahill on ‘Visual representation of an idea’, and Wendy
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Barrett on ‘Landscape Representation’.
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
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(opposite)
(above)
Massy’s Wood, Sectional Drawings
Rockbrook
Group Collaboration
Group Collaboration
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
110 (right) Rockbrook Section Ultan Ó Conchubhair
(opposite) Military Road Model Group Collaboration Photo by Alice Clancy
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Vegetation Plan Ultan Ó Conchubhair
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Staff Symposium
UCD Architecture held a staff workshop on 1st March 2010 at the Irish Architectural Archive, Merrion Square, Dublin. The event was a forum for the examination and discussion of approaches to teaching architectural design studio. Papers were delivered by Michael Pike, Emmett Scanlon and Peter Cody, with discussions chaired by Marcus Donaghy, Kevin Donovan and Sheila O’Donnell. Additionally, Sandra O’Connell presented a paper responding to the findings of staff-student committee reviews for the academic year 2008–09.
Staff Symposium Photo by Stephen Tierney
EVENT / SYMPOSIUM / SEMESTER 1
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FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 2
Bird Watcher’s Cabin River Dodder, County Dublin
Tutors Elizabeth Burns Sarah Cremin Miriam Delaney Tiago Faria Bill Hastings Merlo Kelly Ruth O’Herlihy Mark Price Peter Tansey
This project was for the design of minimal accommodation for an ornithologist, to be used occasionally. Located on the River Dodder, the project presented an opportunity to examine the tailoring of a space to many uses and the relationship between materials of a construction and the structure itself. Site models and conceptual studies were carried out at 1:200, quickly followed by larger scales sketches and models as 1:50 and 1:20. The study was supplemented by a presentation of Survey Skills and Techniques by Bill Hastings.
Dodder Park
(opposite left)
Photo by William Murphy
Short Section (opposite right) Plans Grainne NicGearailt
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LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 2
116 (opposite) Dodder Park Heron Photo by William Murphy
(left above) Bird Hide Plan (left below) Site Section (right) Exploded Axonometric Marc Golden
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LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Design Technologies II: Irish Timber & Sustainability 2010
Tutors Elizabeth Shotton Prof. Eugene O’Brien Assistance Dr. Ken Gavin Dr. Ciaran McNally John Dempsey (Coillte) Michael Murphy
Students Brian Barber Tim Brick Lisa Cassidy Ciaran Conlon Michael Dowd Eoin Horner Sorcha Kenneally Caroline Kiernan Brian Massey Noel Moran Stephanie Monaghan Eoin Murphy Kieran Murray Enda Naughton Luke O’Callaghan Patrick Stack Rob Tobin David Walsh Su Wang
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Cross-section drawing Produced by group
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
The Holy Well of St Mullin’s is located on the opposite shore of the river from the historic enclave of churches and gravesite for which St Mullin’s is so well known, yet forms an integral part of this religious site. Each year on the Sunday nearest to 25th July a pilgrimage, or Pattern as it is known locally, is made between the ecclesiastical enclosure to the Holy Well on the east bank of the river. This is a significant public event in the life of this small community drawing many former residents back to the town for a week of celebration. Currently access to the well is achieved using the road bridge, though historically would have been through the river itself over a set of stepping-stones that create a fording point at low water, still intact at the southeastern tip of the site. More recently there were two small timber bridges linking the church site to the well, one located just south of the steppingstones and a second crossing the millrace to achieve access to the eastern face of the church enclosure. These bridges reinforced what was presumed to be the original Pilgrim’s Path from the rear of the historic churches and provided the community with access to the otherwise inaccessible but very beautiful lands surrounding the historic millrace. In the 1990’s these bridges were removed and since that time the only access to the Holy Well has been via the road bridge.
As the lands surrounding the Holy Well and the millrace are now in public hands there was an opportunity to reinstate and enhance the original Pilgrim’s Path with new timber bridges. Based on a close survey of the lands undertaken in the autumn of 2009 by the staff & students of Architecture Design VII, a proposal was made to Carlow County Council to undertake the design and construction of a set of pedestrian bridges, within the context of the Irish Timber & Sustainability course, to create a full circuit to and from the Holy Well site to rehabilitate this original pilgrimage route. Bridge designs were undertaken by a class of architecture and engineering students for all three sites between January and March of 2010, with significant support from the Professor of Civil Engineering, Eugene O’Brien, and other members of his staff, to address the structural and geotechnical aspects of the designs. The design process involved a closer survey of each site, conceptual development in models, structural calculations and assessment with reference to the newly instituted Eurocodes, detail development in drawing, proposals for installation process and full scale timber prototypes, which resulted in comprehensive design reports for each of the three bridges. In addition, planning documents were assembled and submitted by the students to Carlow County Council for a Part 8 public review process on 11th February, with approval for
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the proposal anticipated on 12th April, 2010. Based on an agreement with Carlow County Council the proposal for a renewed route has been provisionally approved and involves the phased installation of three new pedestrian bridges in this landscape by 2012, beginning in 2010 with the construction and installation of the millrace bridge which will allow access to the Holy Well via the stepping-stones in mid-summer, as well as the lands surrounding the historic millrace throughout the year. The millrace bridge is currently in construction at Richview by Bridge Team 3 (Tim Brick, Lisa Cassidy, Brian Massey, Noel Moran, Eoin Murphy, Kieran Murray), with all materials including prime grade Irish oak and stainless steel fittings paid for by Carlow County Council, and will be installed, with the aid of the Council, in the summer of 2010. Planning permission is anticipated for the remaining two bridge designs, for the park location (Bridge Team 1: Eoin Horner, Sorcha Kenneally, Stephanie Monaghan, Enda Naughton, Luke O’Callaghan, Patrick Stack, David Walsh) and the site adjacent to the steppingstones (Bridge Team 2: Brian Barber, Ciaran Conlon, Michael Dowd, Caroline Kiernan, Rob Tobin, Su Wang) which will act as base documents for design development by future students in the coming two years of Design Technologies II, with construction/ installation of a single bridge anticipated each year.
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Bridge Axonometric Produced by group
(opposite) Jan Olav Jensen at Year 4 reviews Photo by Stephen Tierney
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LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Overlap
Tutors Tiago Faria Stephen Mullhall
Students Amélie Conway Danielle Broe Fox Joe Swan
Overlap is proposed to the students as a processbased, non-prescriptive theme. It is seen as a lens through which investigation can be focused, primarily to facilitate the emergence of questions, but also the simultaneous layering of work processes at different scales. Overlap manifests itself in each project through the impact the design makes in dealing with issues created at a local level, while integrating with the broader context of national and global issues. It enables the student to deal with real problems emerging within contemporary society, offering solutions through architectural form. Each proposal is a product of thought, research and discussion closely knitted into its time and place. The nature and location of each intervention is carefully judged, claiming a point where systems entwine, paths intersect or dwellers interact. Much
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as a knot depends on and provides for both branch and trunk, by definition these specific conditions of overlap depend on forces without. Initially we considered a broad swathe of scales, timeframes, things, fields and thought refining them according to our interests. The points of overlap that began to be uncovered suggested a chain of connections, sequences of cause and effect. The territory of overlap is rich – a place that blurs defined boundaries, where meaning can shift and evolve. The device of overlap is perhaps a twoway lens, looking both out and in, simultaneously magnifying and scrutinising, focusing and blurring, letting in light, narrowing the field.
Amélie Conway’s interest is in movement. Her project proposes a transport interchange on the derelict, northern river frontage of Waterford city, to connect its recently expanded shore, with the old city situated on the opposite side of the river.
Overlap-Networks Amélie Conway
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LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Danielle Broe Fox is interested in the live/work relationship. She is using the commuter town of Trim – surrounded by a ubiquitous ring of housing estates – to propose a new way of living, bound by commonality but also responding to and extending the fabric of the town.
Trim Model Danielle Broe Fox
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125 Joe Swan’s proposal is for a paper mill on a strip of waste land along the M50, where recycled paper is pulped using gravity-fed, grey waste water, harvested and treated in local reed beds.
Marginal Landscape Model Joe Swan
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Transforming Landscapes
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Tutors Mary Laheen Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin
Students Cait Elliot Sarah Maguire Beatrice Moran Alison Rea
Landscapes are created slowly, but can change quickly. The thesis group ‘transforming landscapes’ is concerned with this process of change, of transformation and how our designs can be part of this evolution; to change, to repair and ultimately to reclaim landscapes. In fact, all four students are dealing with landscapes that have already been transformed, some dramatically like the Curragh which has been divided in two by a recently built motorway, and others through a prolonged period of neglect and decline like the empty lot between Thomas Street and Oliver Bond Street in the Liberties of Dublin. In all four cases students have taken on a brief to repair, make links, connect.
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At the Curragh this repair and reclamation is most obvious where Alison Rea proposes extensive land bridges to reunite the plains of the Curragh across the expansive divide of the 20m wide highway that cuts an 8m deep channel into the largely flat plain. Pathways, car-ways, horse paths and the patterns of sheep, as well as military manouevers, are examined and considered under a new strategy for managing the historic landscape.
The Curragh Routes Alison Rea
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LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
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In Skerries, Red Island is notionally rather than actually returned to its island state by bridging across the isthmus with water. Beatrice Moran proposes a community swimming pool which straddles the site, sailing above ground – in its present incarnation – as it cantilevers to east and Skerries Water Bridge
west nodding from sea to sea. Above the pool the intimate spaces of
Beatrice Moran
dressing rooms and showers inhabit the large span structure.
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Cait Elliot is stitching the edge. What edge? The edge of the town (of Monasterevin) and the edge of the landscape – the demesne landscape, the rural landscape and the river – are stitched together in a civic building and new
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square. She reunites town and country, estate and estate village, landscape and settlement, in a building which houses artists’ studios, a gallery and work spaces for the intellectually disabled.
Stitching the Edge Cait Elliot
LANDSCAPE & INFRASTRUCTURE
THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Sarah Maguire, choosing a Dance School as brief, studies the movement of human beings through space. Entering through the Thomas Street gate, beside the National College of Art and Design one gradually descends through brick squares and paths in the undercroft to emerge at Oliver Bond Street, where a community theatre opens onto the residential street. Carried aloft are day-lit dance studios connected across the site by walkways and pedestrian bridges.
Roof Light Sarah Maguire
(opposite) Interior of Odlums Mill Photomontage by Stephen Tierney
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LANDSCAPE
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
& NAVIGATION St Mullins Motte Photo by Stephen Tierney
LANDSCAPE & NAVIGATION
Tod Williams & Billie Tsien Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
INTERVIEW / TOD WILLIAMS & BILLIE TSIEN
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien visited UCD on 4th and 5th March 2010, as guest critics for the fifth year interim reviews. This interview was conducted following their lecture to the School on 5th March.
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Billie Tsien Photo by Alice Clancy
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Tod Williams: Well, it had an extra dimension for me because I grew up right by it, and of my first eighteen years, I had spent fifteen years on the campus, so it was particularly charged. I think that I was, of course, thrilled to be able to do this, but I had also seen a couple of other architects go before and try to interpret the Cranbrook experience – Stephen Holl had started his project, Peter Rose his – and I saw that one of the problems they had was that they were overreaching in terms of detail and underreaching in terms of what I felt was content, which is a deeper layer, and so to some extent – this comes a lot from Billie – not using all of your tools at once was very important, because the landscape itself is so rich that to try to compete on the same level of detail, which is so rich and deep, to try to compete at the same level as the Saarinens…I thought that was impossible. So instead we chose a few ways to enter the project and tried to make them strong.
TW: It’s been a terrible problem over the years and it’s part of the problem with Detroit. Detroit, made on the edge of Canada, was a concentric ringed city, and it grew from the centre on the river out in rings, and as the city became wealthier and the automobile industry felt that they were supreme, they allowed the centre of the city to be left behind and they moved their houses out increasingly to the distance and forgot about the centre of the city, and decided automobiles were more important that public transportation, and in a way they abandoned it. George Booth, who started Cranbrook, saw the beautiful landscape out far away and he was the publisher of the Detroit News, and he picked this location to make a kind of idealized community, so in many ways the idealized community is separate to Detroit. As Detroit burned, I’m afraid that Cranbrook remained sadly indifferent to it. Many of the students and teachers, and residents also, look back to mourn and be concerned with the problems of Detroit, and in recent years I think Cranbrook has made a much better way to try to look back and connect to the city, but it was basically divorced or separated from it. It’s still tough.
LC: You obviously know it extremely well – how does the college relate to Detroit? Is there work made in the city, are there projects set there, is there a link through student life?
LC: Do you think that, as architects, you’re asked often enough to deal with a city in crisis? Is this an opportunity that would interest you, and is this an opportunity you get?
Lisa Cassidy: How did you find working in Cranbrook, with such a particular legacy in terms of the landscape, the built environment and its design history? How did you approach that?
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Billie Tsien: That’s a good question. There are only a few times when we’ve been asked to address social needs, and I think we’ve done that in a series of small libraries that we did for a group called the Robin Hood Organisation, where public schools were chosen and then asked to give over a couple of classrooms to make a library, and then we designed the libraries. But that’s so tiny. TW: Well, we’re doing two ice rinks in Prospect Park, which is absolutely public, and then we’re doing a public walkthrough space in Manhattan. But actually, it is a problem, we work for people who ask us to do things, and frankly it’s rarely through a competition brief, so there’s been little of that over my lifetime. The last social housing that was occurring was really when I was just leaving school, and perhaps now with the Obama administration there may be some coming up, but that doesn’t excuse us as architects from being interested in the subject. Years ago, we were asked to do a project down in Detroit – I worked for the city planning commission when I was a student – but I feel I abandoned the city, and in that case we couldn’t get the project. So, there’s nothing to admire in that. For whatever reason, as we get stronger in terms of our reputation, we’re trying to seek out that kind of work, so we’ll see what projects come in the future, but they’re certainly ones I think we should be involved in.
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LC: What would you think your particular interest in craft and materiality can bring to a project like that? BT: I think that people are so used to seeing a kind of uniformity – people wear the same clothes and wear the same shoes and listen to the same music, and I think those times when something comes into their vision that’s not uniform, it may not stop them in their tracks but I think all of those times are in some way giving food or substance to a larger sense of possibilities in the world. Although it seems that one can buy everything over the internet from all places, it almost seems like the possibilities have narrowed down because they all seem the same. TW: I think also what we can bring there is, as Billie says, being particular, giving character, and a local flavour, the flavour of the craftsman’s hand – I mean, they came from the same place, and the materials. I see one of the questions you’ve got is about Phoenix, and we chose to take advantage of their local industries when building in that place, so I think whether the assignment has got a large budget or a small budget, I think particularising it to place is very useful, and that has to do with the craft, because it’s not our craft. We don’t invent anything, we’re just using and looking at what’s
INTERVIEW / TOD WILLIAMS & BILLIE TSIEN
there and saying, what can we do with this person? What can we do with this material? What can we do with this method of constructing something? LC: Will Bruder, writing about your work in Phoenix, described you as having your antennae up, examining and mining the natural and built environment. Is that an approach you enjoy in every project? BT: I think so, and I think that’s why architecture is such a great profession, because it’s so much about going to a place you don’t know and really looking and discovering things, even if you’re not going far. We have had the luck to go far, and to work on this project in India, and there we were using Indian stone and trying to understand how to use a kind of Indian craftsmanship and also think about a place where the handmade is less expensive that the manufactured, and how to make the best use of that. But I think the same thing is true, you know, in Vermont. I’m not sure, because I’m too close to it to know whether the projects look different, but I know there are formal things that might seem to come up again but I would hope that our projects do look different from place to place because they are so involved in that particular place.
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TW: Well, I’d like to think there are ethical issues that come up again and again. […] One of the problems with working in love, and that may
have been the problem in Bennington, is that it’s a narcissistic approach, and of course, is love narcissistic, self-love. I think the best way to work is in dialogue with something or someone, and the great projects – Lou Kahn working for Jonas Salk, or Michelangelo and the boys in Rome working for the Medicis – those are places when one was both working for someone and working in dialogue with them. If the person on the other side of the table is mute and you have the only voice, then you’re not working in dialogue, it’s sui generis, you’re really working for yourself, and that has its own problems. Big ones. LC: I was interested during the lecture when you mentioned that you found that working in other countries, such as India and I imagine your work in Mexico as well, that your work is best when it’s changing and giving a certain amount over to the sense of place while keeping your own values. Within the US, if you’re working in Arizona compared to New York, does that come in as well on a smaller scale? TW: Very much so, no? BT: Yeah.
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TW: It’s not as abrupt a cultural change as India, or Billie going to China or working in Hong Kong, because all of America is our culture, but they are very different places. Different politics, different weather, different materials. So there’s a lot of variety. LC: Do you see yourselves as American architects? BT: I think so, I think we’re very American in that we’re so varied. That we’re so different seems to me to be very American. The fact that my parents are from China and my culture is completely American. TW: I think that’s true.
BT: Do you think of it as Irish architecture? TW: I think it must be. I think there’s a modesty and a groundedness and a rootedness here that they’re tapping more deeply than we can trap in America. We might tap our restlessness, they tap their rootedness. I’m not sure about that, it’s an interesting question. But I certainly don’t say we’re American architects, but it is true that we are, and it’s true that there’s a logic with Billie’s family coming from China and her looking totally Chinese, but that happens even here in Ireland, are you totally Irish?
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LC: Yeah, I’m afraid. BT: I also think there’s, in a certain way, and I think it comes a lot through Tod’s father who was an engineer, and through Tod, we actually are very practical, I think Americans are very practical, and when we’re building we have these root values about how things must be built well, things must last a long time, and everything is very grounded and there’s not that many impractical things we do. TW: I think that’s true, and at the same time, I just think of myself as an architect. [With O’Donnell and Tuomey, we realize] we share many values, and yet their work is very different to ours, I think because of the place they come from and who they are.
TW: So, through and through. But my mother is from Australia and somewhere back in the centuries before was probably from this neck of the woods. BT: You know, in a certain way… We were looking at the cemetery project yesterday and just thinking about people we know who are usually European who can say they know where their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-greatgrandparents are all buried, because they’re all in the same place, and it’s very rooted. And I can say, well, I know where my grandmother is buried, but I’ll never go back, I’ll never be there again because it’s in China. I know where my father is buried now
because it’s in the United States, I have no idea where my great-grandparents are buried, and it all sort of stops, so the depth of personal history is so different and I do think it’s a sort of wandering […] I thought it was very interesting that in the work we saw, a lot of people […] set their projects in their home town. TW: Yeah, fantastic, and every home town seems so interesting, so much more interesting than my home town, and definitely more interesting than your home town… BT: Yeah, my home town was those estate houses, so. There’s a certainly deeper history here to look into. TW: That also, for you all, both frees us up and makes us a little less rooted. That you say you’re totally Irish means you’re sort of bound by Irishness. LC: I was interested that, in the US, there’s the tradition of…two separate things entirely. Thoreau and Emerson and the escape to the country, and the influence of Walden, and then also the history of the great parks and the campus plans, from Dan Kiley to Olmstead. What are the lines of thought that you or your colleagues or your students are now working with, and what influences are there on thoughts about landscape and the built environment?
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BT: I would say, in general, we feel a little alienated from contemporary landscape practice. I think all landscapes, created landscapes, are to some extent artificial, and certainly Olmstead and Vaux made very artificial landscapes, but they felt very natural. And now so much landscape practice is about making artificial landscapes that look very artificial. I feel very alienated from artificial landscapes that look so artificial. TW: I think I do too. So we have aversions, and that’s a strength and also a weakness. […] If we’re doing something like the case of Prospect Park, and it’s a bunch of trees and it’s nature and it’s at this particular coordinate in the world, but it’s also Olmstead and Vaux’s park, I think it’s always best to see yourself in relation to the best that there is there, so you’re always measuring yourself in relation not to the least but to the best. If the best turns out to be Dan Kiley, then I would like to measure myself against Dan Kiley, or if it’s Olmstead and Vaux or mother nature or Martha Schwartz, I’d like to measure myself against them. It’s not about competing but again, being in dialogue. You’ve got to be able to speak to that person, even as you’re not only speaking to that person, somehow addressing the context I suppose, of relationship.
INTERVIEW / TOD WILLIAMS & BILLIE TSIEN
LC: Very specific question about the pool at Cranbrook – with the panels that open to the sky and to the air through the walls and the roof, how much of the year does the climate allow them to be open? TW: It allows it a lot. They don’t use it maybe as much as I would wish they did, for a couple of reasons. Certainly, it’s not a great energy waster or user, it’s been quite good and it’s in good shape. But what surprised me is that because they do a lot of competitive swimming, when the light comes down into the pool […] it is slightly an interference to the coaches being able to gauge the strokes and see the arm motion, and for the swimmers being able to see how to touch the end. So for that reason they tend to close it, but they love opening it. Occasionally it’s a little bit draughty. […] I think it works very well and I think it’s one of the most successful things we’ve done, and I’m immensely proud of it. I’d like to believe that in the future they’ll open it up even more.
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BT: I think they do keep it open in the wintertime when they’re not having competitions, because when the fins are open then the air comes in and then goes out the top, but when the fins are closed and the top is open the air isn’t really travelling so much, so they keep it open.
LC: With your own experience or what you’ve seen here over the last few days, what interests you and what excites you about architectural education? TW: We were saying last night that what we love is that this place is virtually free of cynicism and irony, that people are sincere and that they’re concerned with the well-being of their environment and with architecture. I’m deeply moved by that. BT: One of the things I see is that it’s very hard to think about landscape when the landscape is so beautiful. It’s very hard, because you are trying to make a building, and how can the building be as beautiful as landscape? The landscape is really powerful, as it is in some of these places, whether it’s going down to the ocean or to the fountain or on the island where nature is so overwhelming. It’s interesting, when the landscape is so powerful, it’s very hard to determine what your position is in relation to it. I think you can only be in relation to it, and not make your own landscape, unless you cordon yourself off and you’re like the farmer who is inside the Georgian walls.
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TW: At the same time, landscape is so difficult because instead of being a flat surface like the table we’re about to eat off where you can see the geometry, it’s really hard to understand the geometry of an undulating surface – and I’m sorry, but computers don’t simulate it really well – and it’s not only undulating but also living and breathing, and it’s very scary territory for young architects. But the fact that you’re taking it on is just brilliant and I wish those were the kind of problems I was faced with when I was young.
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Tod Williams was born in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Princeton University with a Masters in Fine Arts and Architecture at Princeton. Billie Tsien graduated from UCLA with a Masters in Architecture in 1977. Working together since 1977, the husband-andwife partnership formed Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in 1986. Their projects have won many awards including the 2002 Arup World Architecture Award for Best Building in the World for the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and National AIA Honor Awards for the Natatorium at Cranbrook, the Rifkind residence, a house on Long Island, and the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. Williams and Tsien hold the Louis. I. Kahn chair at Yale University, and have
Tod Williams
taught at numerous schools of architecture.
Photo by Alice Clancy
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
Tearmann
Tearmann is the Irish word for ‘shelter’ or ‘refuge’. This project, the design of one of a series of visitors’ lodges, and its surrounding landscape, was thought of as a place to enjoy and engage with context. Students were asked to think of the building as a place to shelter, a place to renew, a place to learn, a place to rest, and a place to share skills and experiences. In parallel with each site strategy, emphasis was placed on studies at a much larger scale, focusing on the material and constructional aspects of the design project, in order that its physical qualities could become manifest.
Contributors Stephen Bates Gary Boyd Cian Deegan Michael McGarry Stephen Mulhall Siobhán Ní Éanaigh Esmonde O’Briain Brian Ward
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Models Daria Pietryka
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
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143 (above) Section showing view from interior (opposite) Plans Hannah Hughes
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 & 3 / SEMESTER 1
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Plan Layers and Corresponding Site Sections Conor McGowan
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Workshops
Students Elizabeth Bourke Phoebe Brady Domhnaill Byrne Rebecca Carroll Conor Clinton Thomas Conlon James Corboy Michael Corcoran Alan Coughlan Kate Cregan Beibhinn Delaney Sarah Doheny Mark Doherty Bronagh Doyle Jude Duffy Eleanor Duignan Aisling Donnelly Avril Dunne Muireann Egan Aprar Elawad Michael Farrell Liam Farrelly Ellen Fitzgerald Thomas Fletcher Rachel Gallagher Niamh Gilmore Donal Groarke
Fiona Harte Clive Hennessy Donn Holohan Andrew Howell Hannah Hughes Greg Jackson Daen Kelly Eimear Kilgarriff Stanislav Kravets Jill L’Estrange Sean Lynch Jennifer Martin Hugh McDermott Damian Milton Daniel Moran Ultan O’Conchubhair Carla Peters Laoise Quinn Robert Reid Fiona Shiels Mary Smith William Spratt-Murphy Ekaterina Tikhoniouk Rebecca Vickers Keith Walsh Amy Widdis Simona Yonkova
Four week-long workshops were offered to Year 2 students prior to their second semester study trip. Pocket Guide Publication Wendy Barrett, Alice Clancy, James Rossa O’Hare Cohesive Construction Andrew Clancy, Colm Moore JOIN
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Anne Gorman, Orla Murphy Set Design
Fiona Hughes, Kevin Donovan
Join Group Studies in situ Photos by Orla Murphy
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147 JOIN The JOIN workshop ran in conjunction with the GMIT Furniture College in Letterfrack, through collaboration with Laura Mays and Anthony Clare from GMIT. It sought to share the skills of students at UCD and GMIT by exploring the relationship between conceptual
consideration of material, the space that material can create, and the physical act of making. Under the theme of The Part and The Whole students were assigned materials of set dimension and asked to use these materials in any way to respond to the theme.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Set Design Workshop
Student Set Designs at the Project Cube Theatre Photos by Kevin Donovan
This workshop was a brief introduction to the creative processes involved in representing a play in a theatre. Over two and a half days, and in collaboration with architect and designer Alyson Cummins, 8 students made proposals for the setting of several scenes from Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight in the Project (Cube) Theatre. The work included the survey of the theatre space and the construction of a model box, the elaboration of story boards and moment drawings and the making of 1:25 model proposals. The work was reviewed on the last afternoon by stage designer Joseph Vanek.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 1
Publication: Pocket Guide To Barcelona An integral aspect of architectural training is to learn to represent architecture and information effectively. This workshop aimed to develop these skills through the production of a pocket guide to Barcelona, illustrating the city and its architecture, in advance of the Year 2 class visit there.
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Production Line Photo by Alice Clancy
(opposite) Students sketching at Igualada Cemetery Photo by Alice Clancy
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SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Barcelona, Spain Year 2 Trip 17th–22nd March 2010
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(right) Models in situ (opposite) Students sketching the Barcelona Pavilion Photos by Alice Clancy
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SCHOOL TRIP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Italy Year 4 Trip 18th–22nd March 2010
A morning spent with Luigi Snozzi in Monte Carasso begining with a lecture in the restored convent of St Augustus.
Luigi Snozzi Photo by Marcus Donaghy
(opposite) Aurelio Galfetti Photo by Luke O’Callaghan
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SCHOOL TRIP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Switzerland Year 4 Trip 19th March 2010
A journey through Bellinzona with Aurelio Galfetti from the Castelgrande to kitchen table; the landscape, history, geology and hydrology of Switzerland unfold through the ensuing discourse of an “architecture of intervention”, students’ sketchbooks employed in quick sucession for impromtu graphic illustration – serving afterwards as an aide-mémoire.
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EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 1
Evening Conversations
Lectures 21st September 2009
Francis Matthews, Laura Kelly and Stephen Tierney discuss image making
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22nd September 2009
Prof. Ole Vangaard opens the erasmus exhibition 23rd September 2009
Hugh Campbell and recent work by O’Donnell + Tuomey 24th September 2009
Recent work by Boyd Cody Architects and Donaghy Dimond Architects The Interior Prospect
Year 4 & 5 Group Tutorial
Stephen Tierney
Photo by Joe Flood
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Travellers’ Inn Staging post for coaches and travellers Cashel, County Tipperary
Tutors Peter Cody Stephen Tierney
Students Peter Cosgrove Joe Flood Alison Hyland Cillian Magee Roisín Ní Bhuadain Patrick Roche Enida Skalonjic Ruth Stewart Robert Tobin James Young Anna Zabiegala Blaine Cagney James Casey Shea Gallagher Emer Hanratty Sarah Maguire Therese Nolan Lisa O’Kane
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Cashel Site Plan Collaborative Drawing
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Backland Site Plan Ciarรกn Conlon
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Detailed Study Ciarรกn Conlon
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164 Sections in Context Ciarรกn Conlon
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(opposite) Section and Interior Material Study (left) Plans
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(below) Site Section James Casey
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Townland
Tutors Orla Murphy Fiona Hughes
Students Gillian Brady Blaine Cagney Amy Fitzgerald Emmet Kenny
TownLand explores the relationship between the space of the contemporary Irish town and the land that lies beyond it. Group members began their research by carrying out a series of tasks in a town of their choice. Four towns of different size, character and morphology were selected: Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, Shannon, Co. Limerick and Birr, Co. Offaly. A range of scales, media and techniques were used as lenses for this mapping. Out of this examination of place, each student developed an hypothesis about the municipal space of the town within the context of the rural landscape. Collectively these thesis projects propose an architecture that values the role of dignified and importantly relevant civic space in the continuing evolution of the Irish country town. Carrickmacross is a market town overlaid on a drumlin belt. Views open between buildings capturing movement, routine and ritual, which appear and disappear into the undulating hinterland. Main Street dips and bows, terminated at each end by a public space controlled by civic buildings.
Gillian Brady’s project for a Primary Health Centre is sited to become a new civic building within this pattern that facilitates wellbeing and connection to garden. The scale of civic space is considered from the far-out view of the landscape to the close-up detail of how a threshold is made.
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Drumlin Model Gillian Brady
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Blaine Cagney’s project explores the relationship of a dairy farm to its local country town of Ballingarry. A spatial and functional relationship that revolves around daily routines of milking, transport, processing and trade. Re-calling the cooperative typology, the brief for a dairy processing co-op and market evokes the familiar, direct and tangible nature of local ritual to re-shape the public space of a small country town.
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Market Square Blaine Cagney
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A modern town designed at the scale of the car and airplane, the urban form of Shannon is low density without a physical centre. The town turns its back on its greatest resource, the Shannon estuary. Amy Fitzgerald’s design for a Water Research Centre on the bank of the estuary facilitates investigation into this vitally important resource and prompts a connection between water, land and town. The project sees context as a tool to knit the fabric of a building into its site.
Section Amy Fitzgerald
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
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Birr in Co. Offaly is revealed as an almost utopian settlement, carefully planned and aggregated over time by its resident landlord. Its urban fabric responded with thought and measure to the needs of its community and reflected its nodal connection to regional networks of movement, post, health and education. As these change to become national in place of regional or virtual in place of physical, Emmet Kenny’s project for a Public House and restoration of Emmet Square seeks to reinforce the physical connection of the public space of town to the community it serves.
Ground & Elevation Emmet Kenny
(opposite) Students at Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects lecture Photo by Alice Clancy
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LANDSCAPE
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& CULTURE Temple of Aphaia, Aegina, Greece Photo by William Murphy
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On Architecture as Art Theo Dorgan
ESSAY / THEO DORGAN
It may well be that among architects, privately, there is a great deal of discussion centred on architecture as an art form, but if this is so, precious little of any such discussion filters out into the culture at large.
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Architects in our time, in our place, are only rarely considered or discussed as artists, only rarely speak of themselves as artists – with the corollary, that architects in their formation are not encouraged to think of themselves as artists. This is both a-historical and an impoverishment of the culture in general. Superficially, it’s easy enough to see why the idea of the architect as artist has become obscured in the present moment. For one thing the work practices of architects have become rather more collective than was the case in even the recent past, making it difficult enough to recognize the signature contribution or aesthetic of individual architects; for another, the ascendancy of the client (and the client’s balance sheet) during the recent years of greed-driven building has tended to focus attention on the utilitarian value of buildings, at the expense of their aesthetic qualities.
Of course significant buildings of enduring aesthetic value have been built in our time – but it seems to this outsider that architects in general, some outstanding buildings aside, have become curiously reticent about claiming artistic value for their work. Architects, like artists in many other fields, have developed a curious shame about beauty. Some of this is to do with a larger crisis of confidence in the culture as a whole, especially among the makers: we have all of us in one way or another come under pressure to monetise our work, to defend our practice on grounds of its commercial or economic value. There have been other kinds of demands, for instance that art should align itself to the prescriptions of political or social agenda-setters. From the left, artists have had demands made on them that their work should be ‘socially useful’ – according to ill-defined criteria which rarely amount to much more than reflexive squawkings of bourgeois
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guilt. From the right we have had to defend ourselves against charges that art is parasitic and unproductive of economic value, is ‘unrealistic’ and immature when it is not spitefully subversive of good sense and common values. As is usual in these periods of uncertainty, faced by conflicting demands from outside themselves, artists have reacted in different ways: some by retreating from a robust belief in the value of what they do into a kind of wounded silence, some by adopting a kind of protective camouflage, disguising their work inside the rhetoric of some party line, and yet others by denying that they are, in fact, artists at all. Many, of course, just sail on past, getting on with the work. Now it’s difficult for a poet to go on publishing poems while denying that writing poetry is in fact what they do; equally, it’s difficult for a painter to deny painting, a composer to deny she is making music; architects, however, seem to me in many cases to be subsuming themselves inside collective practice, and to present their work in public as if they were problem solvers of a rarefied kind in the business of engineering, wedding organizers presiding over the shotgun marriage of money and concrete. I am, of course, caricaturing things here, the situation is neither as simple nor as desperate as I seem to be suggesting, but for all that, there is a real problem in all this.
I can perhaps frame the problem between two quotations from modern masters: The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. —Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. —Mies van der Rohe
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Lloyd Wright’s language will scarcely appeal to the hard-headed moneymaker types of our time – many of whom are clearly without fathers, some of whom are, I suspect, brought into the world without benefit of mothers. The cluster of ideas that hover around the word ‘mother’ in his formulation includes nurturing, quiet, repose, longevity, lineage and benign authority; more problematic to contemporary taste are the words “soul” and “civilisation”, yet they point to, encourage, a cast of mind as irreducible in the furnace of the moment as it will prove necessary in the coming times. Lloyd Wright, to put this as clearly as I can, understands that the making of art is fundamentally a human endeavour – perhaps I should say, is a fundamental human act. Mies, on the other hand, has had a mesmeric appeal for those self-styled ‘masters of the universe’ who have brought the developed world to its present unlovely condition and, in their blind
arrogance, have brought many an agnostic to a point where, unable to believe in God, they are certainly willing to believe in the Devil. The cant of this type is, in a curious reversal of Marx, that the unfolding of markets, the engrossing of wealth, is a function of impersonal forces at work in the world – they see no reason to value any human not concerned with the service of Mammon – theirs is a world where ‘Miesian’ architecture can be indefinitely reproduced by a cheap laptop, properly programmed. “Architecture is the will of an epoch…” – how easy to imagine the sentence issuing from the mouth of Albert Speer. If there is something properly repulsive about the naked will to power, there is something sleazy and unhealthy about an idea of art that sees art as the handmaiden of power. Imagine Mies had said: “Politics is the will of an epoch translated into action”… Between these points of view there is a great gulf fixed. Anyone now in training as an architect might usefully consider what, in fact, the difference is between these two points of view. The distinction can be made with brutal simplicity: you can be an architect-artist, finding lessons and echoes in sibling arts that develop your understanding of your own, you can see yourself as a human being engaged in a profoundly human activity – or you can be a cipher, an empty soul in the service of empty-hearted, arbitrary power.
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All good art comes out of a community of shared and inherited meanings, agreed values. Truly great art will find its truths at a slant to those values, will often upset, reverse or reformulate those values, but great art is never arbitrary – or for that matter abstract, that is to say, divorced entirely from the material world we share with others, from our common tradition, our common human story. All genuine artists know that only when you have understood the past can you try to make something new in the present that might, just possibly, endure in that future where it will become the past of some artist yet unborn. That is the bluntest truth I can think of for any artist. There is no substitute for humility before the dead, camaraderie with the living, personal courage and discipline – and a healthy wish to leave something of value behind when you go, for the benefit of the unborn. All this, of course, inescapably, requires a great deal of hard work, a willingness to immerse oneself in the tradition, to learn from the past as the precondition for developing a style and courage of one’s own. This is, as everyone knows, an attitude inimical to the spirit of the present age, where a 14 year old boy winning a heat in a TV talent competition will blurt out “Oh thank you, thank you, this is what I’ve dreamed of all my life.” The architectural expression of this mindset is post modernism. This unlovely (and thankfully short-lived) fever had its roots in the childish idea
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that one could arbitrarily appropriate elements of past styles as garnishes on pedestrian architecture, in the deluded belief that one was making something new by stealing ignorantly and at random from the dead. (Incidentally, the most grotesque example I can think of is the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The work of a paranoid colour-blind Legomaniac, it is in its own weird way the perfect objective correlative for the work and persons of the unlovely service it houses.) “The mother art is architecture…” – among other things, I think Lloyd Wright means us to understand that to make shelter, home, temple and theatre is a primal and ancient impulse, one carried on from generation to generation. This is not, properly understood, a conservative proposition in itself; it asks of us only that we identify and respect what is good and eternal (‘recurring’, if ‘eternal’ makes you uneasy) in what humans make. A revolutionary himself, Lloyd Wright saw no need to stake his identity as a grown artist on the death of the mother. The point is to be an adult, not a matricide. And the point of being an adult is, surely, to stand on your own two feet – the ambition of any good mother, of course being that her child will grow to do exactly that. One could say, of course, that Lloyd Wright is being a touch sentimental – not everything mother tells us is true, as we know – and there is something
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to be said for Mies’ unremarkable intuition that the spirit of an age is reflected in its architecture – but it is not my business here to set up one against the other. I choose these quotations because they seem to me to point up an interesting moment in the education of young architects, a choice if you wish. A young architect today who is not grounded in the history of the art, who is not taught that architecture is art, seems to me to be facing into a hollow second-class professional life. One must immerse oneself in the lineage before breaking free. It seems to me, too, that to launch yourself at expressing “the spirit of the epoch” is a snare and a delusion – as setting yourself an abstract target always is. This state of mind, distressingly commonplace at the moment, is properly termed ‘empty dreaming’. The trick is to situate yourself exactly where you stand in space and time, confident of and aware of the past, alive in the present, expectant of the future. The past is full of unfathomable riches, lodged in the obliging matrix of memory. Some of it, as you will discover, is not without merit. More importantly, in the study of the past you will find you are exercising memory, training memory to sift and store, ultimately to retrieve when needed, the spur to imagination when, at last, you have the opportunity to shine.
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And what will it mean, to shine? To make something beautiful, powerful and meaningful that will endure in memory. Let me give one simple example. The Temple of Aphaia, on the north-eastern corner of the island of Aegina, is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Reduced to bare bones by the passage of time, it no longer has the polychrome intensity that must have struck its first users with such force. Too, the function for which it was designed is no longer available to us, our belief-systems have changed so radically, and we cannot hope to recapture the sense of community that must have given the building its charge of meaning and power. So, why should it have such a powerful effect on us still? Well, the site for a start. The classical Greeks had a profound sensitivity to location, and very often chose places of immense intrinsic felt power as sites for their most important buildings. Almost all Greek temples are built on sites of great geomantic power, very often sites that have long cultic histories before ever being chosen as sites for buildings. They used the word temenos, sacred space, for such locations. The architect would have been schooled in what we might call the prehistory of the site, alive to the powers of the site, familiar with other temples built on similar sites, conversant with the uses to which the temple would be put. He (this is a long time ago) would also have known, without making a fuss about it, that he was sending
his building into the future – without putting any particular value on that. It’s just that, well, they built to last – in stone on a stable site, in an equable climate, in a settled society. To me, visiting today, these are speaking stones. They echo and somehow complete the surrounding context – bare sun-broken rock, deep-shaded pinewoods, the sea glittering far below, the bowl of the sky a deep rich blue overhead. I sense the hand that shaped the stone, I am entranced by the dance of proportion and measure, I hear the music of geometry, I feel myself in the presence of living minds. Here is architecture that I understand as I understand a poem – and I am sure a musician would understand this temple as she understands the architectonics of a piece of music. There is a mystery here, and the heart of the mystery is that the building speaks across time. It endures across time and in time, it commands the experience of itself, it lives in the space it inhabits, in a slow dance with time, decay and the eternal. It isn’t done to say so, but every work of art expresses an ambition on the part of its maker that the work will outlast the time of its making. This is a right and proper ambition for an artist, but it comes at a price few are prepared to pay: you must learn to serve your art with true humility, choosing the survival of the work over the survival of your name if that’s the deal you’re offered.
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We cannot live outside history, in a willed dreamtime of our own, a kind of defiant solipsism, and nor can our work be free of the watermark of the time we live in, the world and the language we share with others. Nevertheless, because we know that art not founded on memory is meaningless, we can legitimately hope to produce, from time to time, a poem, a painting or a building that will outlast its moment, pass on into the afterlife, into the memory of those yet to come. To do that, to send a message into the unknown future, we must be capable of receiving, responding to, the messages sent on into the once-future that is our living present. The more perfectly we give ourselves to the past, the more likely we are to transcend the present with a gesture that achieves the future. The more likely we are to understand what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he said: A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.
The proper foundation for all art is the study of what cultivates and enriches the heart.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, prose writer, editor and broadcaster. His most recent collection of poems, GREEK, has just been published by Dedalus Press. He is a member of Aosdana.
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 & 5 / SEMESTER 1
Unfolding Ideas, Constructing the Site Research Centre, Community Hall and connecting landscape Roundstone, County Galway
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Colm Moore
Students Claire Chawke Alexander Creane Edin Gicevic Carla Hayes Ronan Kenny Elspeth Lee Stephen McNamara Eoin Murphy Luke O’Callaghan Cian Scanlon Patrick Stack Lena Steinbuch Amy Fitzgerald Piers Floyd Danielle Fox Dara Farrell Caroline Kennedy Joseph Mackey Martin Tiernan Aisling Walker
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Roundstone, Co. Galway Photo by Mac Jordan
(opposite) Site plan Edin Gicevic
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(opposite top left) Perspective drawing (opposite top right) Model (opposite bottom right) Section drawing (right) Plans Edin Gicevic
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Puppet Theatre
Exploration of the spatial possibilities of an empty building, or ‘container’ was carried out through the design of a puppet theatre, within an existing structure on Newmarket Square. The design was to be structurally independent of the walls, and a central consideration was how to light the space through the roof. An emphasis in the latter stages of project was on the description of materiality, atmosphere and design development.
FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
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185 (above left & right) Model (opposite) Section Linda Prendergast
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(left)
(above)
Axonometric of Semi-Public Space
Tiered Interior Model
David Mulkeen
Cillian Brody
(opposite) Theatre Model Leisha McPartland
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Interior Perspective Drawings John Nolan
(opposite) Drawing – rendered section through auditorium
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Into Landscape A series of mystery tours
EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 2
Lectures 25th January 2010
Stories in a Landscape – Orla Murphy Shannonbridge 1810 – Mark Price 1st February 2010
Georgian Dublin: Landscapes of an absent point of view – Dr. Finola O’Kane I’m curious to know… – Chris Boyle 8th February 2010
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Gilles Clement – Desmond Byrne GAA Fields – Aoibheann Ni Mhearain 15th February 2010
Fínis Island – Merlo Kelly Landscape as experience in Antonioni’s ‘The Red Desert’ – Kevin Donovan 22nd February 2010
Krakatoa to Garnish Island – Dr. John Olley The ricer terraces of the Philippine Cordillera – Mary Laheen
Michael Pike Photo by Alice Clancy
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Over five consecutive Monday evenings, the ‘Into Landscape’ lecture series encompassed ten brief talks by members of staff, organised by Michael Pike. Chris Boyle Photo by Stephen Tierney
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Reflections on the Into Landscape Lecture Series Philip McGlade Year 3
their construction and maintenance, and how they convey prevalent attitudes towards landscape within Irish culture. Desmond Byrne gave an account of the work of Gilles Clement, looking at his studies on the rich potential of the ‘third landscape’, the leftover spaces of cities, of un-built sites, inaccessible or forgotten land, and rural space in-between industrialised, agricultural or forested territories. Orla Murphy talked about assimilation into her new home territory of County Mayo through the stories and the people of its landscape. Finola O’Kane discussed the beginnings of suburbia in Dublin, revealing how the suburban estate of Mount Merrion was formed by the Fitzwilliams and how it influenced later developments in the area. As wide-ranging as the content was, there were themes common to all of the lectures, and over the course of the series several key considerations about landscape were revealed. One central strand of discussion related to the landscape being in a constant state of change, often as the result of natural forces, like the rhythm of the seasons or erosion due to temperature, wind or rain. Tales of rivers shifting course along different path through the land, seas eroding inland whilst depositing and creating elsewhere, and of constant tectonic forces changing the mapped world were illustrative of ecological systems constantly rebalancing to change the appearance of the landscape, whether there is human interference or not.
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Intended to offer an insight into ways in which some school staff consider landscape, and to stimulate a wider discussion around this year’s theme of ‘Landscape and Economy,’ the lecture format allowed for a brief description of specific projects or aspects of a landscape that interested the speaker, followed by an open discussion arising from each. The resultant exploration of landscape was extremely varied. We learnt from Mark Price, through a brief history of warfare, how landscaped military defenses evolved from the geometries of the projectile, to produce the fort at Shannonbridge, Co. Offaly. Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin examined the typology of G.A.A. pitches around the country, their connection to community, the economy of
In addition to these natural changes there was much discussion of the mans’ direct actions and adjustments of landscape to suit different purposes, from erasing natural features to make the land fit to the orthogonal geometries of drawing and urban habitation, or mimicking and recreating the natural. In his talk on various artificial or altered landscapes, Chris Boyle described the landscape as, “a palimpsest… all landscapes are a series of layers… layers as being constructed… [which] constantly get exposed or built over or erased or renewed.” John Olley, in his talk, drew comparison between the island of Krakatoa after it was destroyed by volcanic eruption in 1883, and Garnish Island off the West Cork coast. At Krakatoa nature slowly built itself up again after the eruption destroyed all life on the island, with the biodiversity returning over time. This natural process, of a dead island regaining its life, was compared with the forced transformation of barren Garnish into a sub-tropical garden paradise through a series of man-made actions; “…However, most of [the] planting failed, because in Glengariff bay there is no shelter from wind and salt so nothing much could grow. So that barren island needed something else besides the hand of the architect. It needed perhaps the experience of living in a windswept environment. The first thing that had to be done was the planting of a shelter belt... the species were conifers, both
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salt and wind resistant. Immediately once you start to shelter an island you can start growing other things and as they grow as well the microclimate changes. The other problem with a barren island was the lack of soil. Initially they had to take a rather heavy hand and bring in much of the soil. Another problem is that of water, but that process of beginning to grow trees is the beginning of wisdom...the litter from the trees leads to the production of soil which will hold the moisture... this island gets transformed over time...” Parallel to the theme of an ever-changing landscape were discussions of the cultural landscape, formed and maintained according to the beliefs or practices of a particular culture. One example was illustrated by Mary Laheen’s portrayal of the rice terraces high in the mountain ranges of the Philippines. This distinctive landscape exists as a result of the symbiotic relationship of the remote tribal communities with their land. Their culture has evolved over time to work in harmony with their environment and maintain a delicately balanced ecosystem that allows them to thrive in challenging mountain terrain; “…Part of their customary law was a zoning system based on altitude, divided into strips. So each community had a strip of the mountain. At the top were tropical rain-forests, this area, human society could go up there to pick mushrooms and flowers or hunt but they were not allowed to cut
EVENTS / LECTURES / SEMESTER 2
trees. This top forest was protected by deities, other-world beings and soul-stealers... it would bring you bad fortune to cut the trees here, they were protecting the watershed and the soil by doing this, partly fighting against soil erosion... lower down in what they call a buffer zone was a clan forest that the community could use for building houses and firewood, but there were laws about replenishing that, so every time you cut down a tree it had to be replaced… around the settlements were green belts acting as a buffer to the terraces, where they grew citrus trees and vegetables...” As a culture changes, so do its actions upon the landscape; sometimes slowly, but often fervently and without due consideration of the processes, as was the case in Italy’s rapid industrialisation of the mid-twentieth century. Kevin Donovan examined the film ‘Il Deserto Rosso’ directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, which looked at this period of Italy’s swiftly changing, newly industrialised landscape. Kevin discussed how, following an accident, the main character finds herself at odds with her landscape, unable to connect or orientate herself; “... Juliana is often seen montaged onto the landscape. She appears as if she is on the landscape rather than in it, she is viewing it rather than operating within it. In such scenes this is because the industrial plant and this wide low landscape exists for her on an abstract level, she doesn’t really know what to make of it: its scale
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isn’t easily negotiable, it pre-exists her arrival in the place, it’s a hostile environment, it’s not of her making, it operates according to rules by which it’s difficult to live… it’s a fascinating but an uncomfortable place, and yet she has to inhabit it...so she inhabits the place by walking, and by walking, and walking, and walking, through this quasi-industrial, quasi-natural landscape. She is often seen from behind as if she is walking out into the world and one has the feeling from her movement in this film that sense is made of the world by walking into it, by carrying out the simplest physical practice one can, which is intuitive and largely unplanned... She often deviates from the planned paths of her environment, she moves out of the rudimentary place-making of the factory complex into the wilderness. It’s her way of appropriating the place, it gives rise to the possibility of connection between here and there...”
All of the ‘Into Landscape’ talks are available to view as videos in the library.
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Kevin Donovan Photo by Stephen Tierney
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2
Learning and Landscape
Tutors Will Dimond Eileen Fitzgerald Irene Kelly John Barry Lowe Deirdre McKenna Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin John Parker Emmett Scanlon
Students Suzanne Betts Darran Brennan Amy Bulman Moira Burke Jo Anne Butler Aidan Carty Dara Challoner Robert Coleman Patrick Conway Donal Crowe Alice Devenney Christina Devereaux Elaine Fanning Edward Feeney Denis Forrest Garrett Fullam Shane Garvey Seamus Guidera Sarah Halpenny
Nicole Hardy Lloyd Helen William Hutch Edwin Jebb Kathleen Kelly Vadim Kelly David Kennedy Tara Kennedy Shirley Kenny Neil Keogh Stephen Laverty Ciana March Helena McCarthy Caitriona McGilp Philip McGlade Kevin McGonigle Conor McGowan Jennifer McLoughlin David McMillan
Barbara McShane Caoimhe Merrick Cathal Monaghan Orla Monaghan Ronan O’Boyle Melanie O’Brien Aileen O’Connor Caitriona O’Connor Dawn Parke Daria Pietryka Sandra Plantos Dina Ryan Patrick Stokes-Kelly Shane Sugrue Shane Twohig Maarten van Dam Bróna Waldron Rebecca Wallace Adrian Wong
For the child, the school is the place of transition from the utterly subjective experience of infancy to the challenge of community. This place of learning occupies a territory somewhat between home and “the world”. It is in ways a domestic building type but for the child it represents “civitas”. The collective spaces of hallways, assembly and playground presage the public urban spaces of street, square and park. Through two separate briefs, two stages of education were explored, the first for a combined Pre-school and Primary School, the second brief for a Secondary School with combined Community Support Facilities. The project was supported by talks from Finola O’Kane Crimmins on ‘Traditions of Education in the Irish Landscape’, Sarah Sheridan on ‘Neutra and Schools’ and Sarah Mulrooney on ‘Educational Theory.’ As an introductory study, each student was asked to consider an essential idea about the learning environment in response to a selected text on education, and to imagine a place of learning by producing a scale model, independent of brief and site.
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197 Learning Landscape Model Dara Challoner
Individual and Community Territories Edwin Jebb
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2
198 (left) Classroom Study Model 1:20 David Kennedy
(opposite) Interim Group Reviews Photo by Alice Clancy
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2
200 (opposite) Strategic Site Model
Strategic Site Model
Interim Site Strategy Model
Alice Devenney
Seamus Guidera
Conor McGowan
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Inside/Outside
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Colm Moore
Students Paul Flynn Lisa O’Kane Jennifer O’Leary
This studio explores the relationship between inside and outside in its broadest sense. There are many potent structures in the Irish landscape that contain internal and external spaces; their boundaries may be walls, moats, level changes, hedges, cliffs. What they have in common is that the landscape is within the walls, part of the architectural project. Our students design proposals explore and investigate the nature of thresholds, enclosure, cover, screens, under and over, light and dark, views into and through spaces. Simple, ordinary buildings can be enhanced by intense and focused consideration of the nature and extent of the physical boundary between
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Plan of original courthouse illustrating extent of threshold with ground surface Group Study
outside and inside. Contingent spaces that exist in the in-between, where a person can pause without committing to entering or leaving, enrich experience. From the outset we limited our investigation to typical building programmes, with a focus on amplification and celebration of the everyday. The students undertook study trips to Classical Irish Courthouses. The work focused on the elaborate transitional space between forecourt and courtroom, composed of a series of external and internal public rooms within the public landscape of a town. Analytical drawings were made to study this extended threshold and the nature of the resultant spaces. Following this study, with its focus on the role of institutional buildings within the fabric of the community, the group made the decision to undertake the study and design of school buildings. Collective investigation of personally chosen precedents were made and assessed within agreed parameters and by particular comparison with the Department of Education design guidelines. The individual character of the chosen landscape for each project provides a means of developing the study’s conclusions. All of the work concentrates on character and atmosphere to define a sense of interior or exterior; an enclosed space may feel as if it’s outside, a courtyard can be a room. A place for learning may be beneath a tree, a landscape extend into a classroom.
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Section of precedent study – Strawberry Vale Pre-School, British Columbia by Patkau Architects – to show relationship of classroom to raised landscape outside Group Study
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Site drawing at interim stage in context of Ratoath Jennifer O’Leary
204 Jennifer O’Leary is designing a 16 class primary school on a site in the rapidly expanding town of Ratoath. She is working with historic and contemporary context to make a community building designed as a series of courtyards utilising sophisticated concepts of public, shared and private outdoor space.
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205 An existing stable yard within the romantic landscaped demesne of Castledawson House provides the starting point for Lisa O’Kane’s ‘integrated’ school. The design explores social integration as well as the integration of old and new buildings and broader landscape elements.
Model of Moyola Park School and interim stage scheme Lisa O’Kane
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Paul Flynn is designing an Irish language boarding school in Ring, Co. Waterford, which
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is also a community and cultural amenity for Irish music. His design deals with the relationship between living and learning; he uses outdoor and transitional spaces at different levels to explore this in plan and section.
1:100 Study model of a Classroom Paul Flynn
(opposite) Upper School Table Review Photo by Stephen Tierney
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LANDSCAPE
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
& DWELLING High Great Chamber, Hardwick Hall Photo courtesy of the National Trust
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A living plan of rooms On revisiting Hardwick Hall Stephen Bates
ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
Our everyday world is a world of rooms. In those rooms is space and in that space lives life.1
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Stephen Bates Photo by Alice Clancy
UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2010
Moving through the rooms of the grand house of Hardwick Hall guided by stewards and ropes, walking around and between seemingly fixed-inplace furniture and empty rooms in respectfully hushed voice one becomes sensitive to the phases of each room’s life through use, of the effect of time and occupation and of a palpable sense of personal character and cultural conventions. One becomes aware that these spaces have lives. Visiting them long after their original purpose has become obsolete, the atmosphere remains charged with the traces of past occupation. In 1600 between sixty and ninety people resided at Hardwick Hall, conducting a ritualised daily routine in an atmosphere of hustle and bustle. Organised like a court with Bess of Hardwick at the centre, her own immediate family, the upper servants, and the lower servants, radiated from her in concentric circles. Men did most of the work as servants The house was lit by candles. Water was carried through the rooms in jugs, as there was no running water. Away from the proximity of fireplaces rooms were cold, with two or three layers of curtains against windows and drapes over doors. By day, many of the rooms would have been noisy, with an animated and convivial central Great Hall, a multi-purpose room used by the lower servants to dine in, play cards and spend their non working time. At night, the same servants would bed down on landings of the main staircase, outside
bedchambers, on pallets with straw mattresses pulled out from under the master’s or mistress’s bed, in the scullery, off the pantry and hall. Family and servants of each tier were tied with a bond which, though hierarchical, was rooted in mutual care, commitment to the household and perhaps even love. The matrix of connected rooms, with an emphasis on a middle room, was a typical household space arrangement in Europe at the time, providing constant interaction and proximity between those who served and those served. Privacy was achieved by layered thresholds from public room to private chamber. In houses like Hardwick, the plan represents a way of life: they were not divided according to function but according to status, with increasingly ceremonial rooms on each floor. The design of the plan and facades has been attributed to Robert Smythson (1535–1614). He was a stone mason by trade, but by the time he was thirty years old he had become a master mason familiar with the classical orders and inspired by Italian architects such as Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, with their interest in symmetry, ‘through halls’ and a compactness in internal planning. Smythson had assisted in the remodelling of Longleat House (1554–1580) and went on to author the designs at Wollaton Hall (1580–88) and Worksop Manor (1585). ‘Architect’ and ‘architecture’
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were not yet words in the Elizabethan period, and the development of design was a collaborative enterprise between client, qualified craftsmen and labourers. This may explain the unique and seemingly contradictory aspects of the house, with formal exploration of symmetry, huge expanses of glass and ‘devices’ often at odds with the idiosyncratic accommodation of the needs of rooms and people . The results are often spectacular, through the mismatch between the outside and the inside and the rich disorientation of the interior. Behind the uniform facade, symmetrical on all four sides with a basic rectangular structure surrounded by six towers, lies a spatial plan of rooms with a great variety of sizes and volumes, ranging from the intimate closet to the majestic Long Gallery. At the centre of the plan, and the point of entry, is the Great Hall. This is understood to be the first example of a cross hall, which broke with medieval tradition by being placed symmetrically in the centre of the house and at right angles to the main front. The adjustment is thought to have derived from Smythson’s earlier designs for much smaller hunting lodges, but the colonnades placed between towers at the back and front suggests the influence of the plan of Palladio’s Villa Valmarana in Lisiera. It also demonstrates the declining role of the Great Hall in Elizabethan houses, once the ceremonial heart of the formal home, now a large
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entrance hall through which the visitor would be led to the main stairs as part of a formal promenade through the house. The stair itself embodies the picturesque potential so fully exploited in English architecture and is experienced as a beautiful sequence of spaces. The stone steps are broad and rise through compressed, tall spaces with straight, tapered flights, changing direction and re-orientating the visitor until they arrive at a small vestibule at second floor level, which opens onto the High Great Chamber. In 1600, the stair space, now lined with Flemish tapestries, would have been bare and sparse except for beds, forms and tables on the landings for waiting and sleeping servants (although the beds would have been turned up to be concealed during the day). The second floor contained the state rooms laid out in a sequence appropriate to a royal palace. Indeed, it is generally recognised that Bess sought to establish a regal residence either to entertain the travelling Queen Elizabeth I (who never visited), to accommodate Queen Mary of Scots (who never resided there) or to provide for the needs of a potential queen (her daughter Arabella, who never became queen). The sequence followed the tradition of progressively more private spaces, from a public to a more private chamber, to the bedchamber to which intimates only would have had access, with adjoining closets and a back stairs
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allowing servants to move rapidly between floors. The ceremonial pivot was the High Great Chamber, a reception room equivalent in volume to a modernday five-bedroom house. The Great Chamber was used for receiving, entertaining, dancing, music-making, performing masques and plays. Its principal use was for dinner, and meals here would have been served with great ceremony, with food carried up from the ground floor kitchen. The proportions of this room were in part set by the need to accommodate two sets of Flemish tapestries bought by Bess four year before construction commenced on the house. The tapestries cover the wall space exactly between the skirting and the frieze. A low door positioned discreetly behind the raised receiving chair, in the corner of the room, connects to the Withdrawing Chamber, which is in turn connected to the Best Bedchamber via another door in the diagonally opposite corner. Pre-dating the enfilade, which sought an axial arrangement of doorways connecting a suite or rooms with a continuous vista, this arrangement of connected spaces is more discontinuous and elaborate than those that will later follow. It seems to emphasise the marking of individual territory and character to each space and creates a labyrinthine matrix of spaces which brings a degree of surprise and drama to the experience of moving through.
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(above) Stone Staircase Photo courtesy of the National Trust
(opposite) Exterior, Hardwick Hall Photo by Stephen Bates
This is felt most acutely as one enters the Long Gallery, through the second low door in the Great High Chamber. This door is half screened by a tapestry, which loops over the top of the door in such a way as to require the visitor to stoop and dip their head as they pass, entering from the corner at one end. This room, primarily used for exercise in winter and in bad weather, is the most dramatic of volumes at Hardwick, filling the whole eastern half of the house at this level and measuring fifty one metres in length, eight metres in height and varying between seven and twelve metres in width. The room is dominated by a ceiling of ornamental plasterwork in a pattern of circular ribs, painted white. Plastered ceilings became characteristic of Elizabethan interiors as an alternative to the open timber roofs in the tradition of Medieval halls and were established by French ĂŠmigrĂŠ plasterers who imported the soft, slow-setting lime plasterwork technique, moulded not by hand but repetitively in wooden moulds. Despite its size, the Gallery has a soft acoustic, due to the wall tapestries and rush matting. Regularly watered, as it became brittle when dry, the matting gave a rustic smell to the room, and together with the mustiness of the faded tapestries this gives the modern-day visitor a strong impression of time standing still. There is a stillness in this space, as if the protagonists of this communal room had left momentarily and not
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ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
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Hardwick Hall, Ground Floor Plan Stephen Bates
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Hardwick Hall, Long Section Stephen Bates
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ESSAY / STEPHEN BATES
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come back. The visitor encounters the space as if finding chairs pushed away from a table, indicating a gathering just missed and leaving a sense of a moment just passed. It is not possible to disengage these powerful spaces with the equally strong personality of their owner, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. The Hardwick family were minor gentry established at Hardwick for at least six generations. Having been born at the Old Hall on the estate around 1527, Bess was to control the estate by 1583 when she was in her mid 50s. Having risen through the ranks from gentlewoman or upper servant, through four marriages she became a businesswoman, landowner, collector of wealth and a loyal, yet ambitious follower of the sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I. Her fourth marriage was to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury in 1567, when she was forty years old. The Earl of Shrewsbury was promoted to a high position at Elizabeth’s court and given the task of custodian to Mary Queen of Scots from 1569 to1584, and this significantly increased Bess’s social standing in both the royal court and her home county. This period coincided with the length of her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury, which collapsed in the same year as Mary was finally executed. It was in the same year as the death of her then estranged husband in 1590 that she began construction of the new hall
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at Hardwick. The guest walking across the lead roof on fine days or warm nights, from the stair in one tower to the banqueting room (to take sweet meats after dinner) in the opposite tower, surveying the expanse of the Derbyshire landscape, would not have been unaware of the power of this formidable octogenarian. Bess’s identity is graphically reinforced through the strapwork initials placed under a coronet in silhouette on the parapets of the six towers. The towers assume an endless variety of groupings according to the angle from which they are seen. Their placement away from the corners led to striking effects of stepping and recession, the effects of which were perhaps inspired by the new science of perspective emerging at the time which began to change the way composition was considered. The four-way symmetry of the facades is emphasised by the classical entablatures which run all around the house between each storey. The height of these storeys progressively increases in a kind of ‘upside-down’ classical order, their differences marking the social importance of their function. The tall windows, however, owe nothing to the architecture of Italy as their extruded proportions hint at influences from Flanders. The windows define the character to the house, through the dematerialisation of the facade and the shimmering visual effect of the multiple cast glass plates held lightly within a fine lead net.
It is the contradiction inherent between the appearance of consistency given by the repeated rhythm of windows and the experience of rich volumetric variety of the interior that becomes an education to the modern-day visitor, provocatively challenging the conventions of 20th century Modernism. Some of the windows are completely false and have chimney flues behind them. In other cases what seems to be one window on the exterior conceals two storeys. The result is a complex entity that seems to extend beyond the limits of architecture into the world of ideas of those who initiated its realisation and whose voices one can still sense within its empty rooms.
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1 Emmett Scanlon, ‘A View with a Room’, in The Lives of Spaces, 2008
Stephen Bates graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1989 and gained professional experience in London and Barcelona prior to establishing Sergison Bates architects in 1996. He has taught at a number of schools of architecture, including the Architectural Association in London, and was Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He is
(opposite)
currently Professor of Urbanism and Housing at
Rooftop Banqueting Room
the Technische Universität in Munich. In addition
Photo courtesy of the National Trust
to his academic commitments, he lectures extensively both in the UK and abroad and writes regularly on architecture. Since 2005 he has also been a member of the Arts Enabling Group of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), London.
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EVENTS / EXHIBITION / SEMESTER 2
Atlas of Cavan Exhibition From 1st February 2010 Red Room
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This exhibition was first shown in the Johnston Central Library in Cavan town in November 2008. The work is the result of a year’s architecture residency by Orla Murphy and Dermot McCabe who were invited by Cavan County Council to research and respond to the theme of Cavan Re-Imagined. The process of examining the town through fieldwork and collaboration with students of St Patrick’s Secondary School revealed 17 laneways, which thread between the town’s two main streets, trapping space with potential for civic inhabitation. Rather than proposing specific intervention in these spaces the exhibition aims to suggest to the viewer how urban space may be adaptable to change. A hand-made Atlas is the focus of the exhibition. The Atlas maps the present laneway spaces and, in a play on children’s cut-and-stick games, invites the reader to make and imagine their own Cavan. Special thanks to Rhonda Tidy of the Cavan Arts Office, Leon Lynch of St Patrick’s College Cavan and to Lisa Cassidy who collaborated on the project.
Sponsors Cavan County Council Arts Office, Arts Council, NRA, Simon J Kelly + Partners Architects
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(opposite) Laneways model (left) Atlas of Cavan Photos by Conor McKeown
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2
Housing Design Cavan, County Cavan Site Visits 28th & 29th January 2010
Focusing on one of three sites of varying conditions, the class examined how best each could be inhabited. How could an intervention create a place that is great to live in? How can housing reinforce a sense of place, a connection to the community and a relationship with the wider context? Each student was asked to examine how residential units could be flexible and adaptable to accommodate different occupants with varied working, living and social demands for the period of their lifetime. An analysis of the broad and complex considerations within housing were carefully distilled to inform the design project. Prevalent issues included daylight, privacy, relationship of internal to external space, semi-external space, threshold, repetition, variance, mix of dwelling types and sizes, mix of other uses, topography, scale, grain, unity‌ Sites selected were all within existing back-lands of Cavan town.
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(right) On-site surveying, Cavan (opposite) Round table reviews Photos by Alice Clancy
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(above) Cavan Site Drawing Don Holohan
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MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 1
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225 (previous spread, opposite & left) Typological Approaches to Site, Interim Stage Collective Work Photos by Alice Clancy
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Brief Utopia Tim Robinson
TEXT / TIM ROBINSON
The people who figure in architects’ illustrations are a favoured subspecies of the human race. They do not suffer from thick waists or round shoulders, they do not grow old, their children commit no vandalism. They stroll through sunlit plazas enjoying retail opportunities and socializing with their like. They relax by cooling water-features. In their spacious homes they rarely exert themselves to do more than stand elegantly and sip wine. Some anthropologist should write them up.
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M and I recently had the privilege of joining their number. Sheila O’Donnell and Colm Moore gave their UCD students an essay of mine on our house in Roundstone and asked them to draw or model it on the basis of my words and their own imaginations. The results were surprising; imagination won out over my topological precisions. I had mentioned the number of reflections that illuminate the building, which has many windows and glass screens and overhangs the sea. The students’ versions were multidimensional palaces built for reflections. Somewhere they had read that I once studied mathematics, back in the Stone Age. Our house became a mathematician’s necromantic cell. A second part of their project was to make an accurate record of the house and its garden. All day, as M read in her room and I pecked at my keyboard in mine, they tiptoed about us, measuring, sketching and photographing. We began to feel transparent, nonentical. Or we were being transformed into members of the superior class of beings described above – inadequate specimens, but still with a touch of their ethereal glamour. The magic has since worn off, alas. Features of the building I had not mentioned reassert their primacy: its dampproblem and its spider population. But it was a day of transcendence for us and for the house.
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House for a Mathematician Edin Gicevic
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LECTURES / SEMESTER 1
Aurelio Galfetti
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Works illustrated by
(opposite)
Aurelio Galfetti, Red Room
Dwelling in Greece
Photo by Alice Clancy
Aurelio Galfetti
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FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 1
Technology Programme
The first year Architectural Technology programme consists of three linked elements; technology studio, the lecture series and a research project. The emphasis is on giving first year students a good foundation of knowledge in building materials, construction techniques and the processes of construction. We concentrate on the domestic scale to explain the link between the design process and decisions relating to construction itself. The programme is supported by hands-on demonstrations, exercises in the building laboratory and site visits. The lecture course focuses on the principles of building; examples are drawn from high quality contemporary architecture. The technology project promotes the individual observation and analysis of an existing building, in order to reinforce an understanding of the links between the final built work and the material and processes employed. Both the technology and design studio programmes are closely linked to ensure that technology is seen as integral to the design process.
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Wall Section Linda Prendergast
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As part of the first year lecture series on contemporary approaches to building technology, Cian Deegan of TAKA architects gave a workshop on the construction and detailing of their Brick House. Students subsequently completed wall studies based on principles of brick construction.
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TAKA was founded by Alice Casey and Cian Deegan in 2006. Alice and Cian both graduated from Dublin Institute of Technology in 2003. Alice has worked with Curtis Wood Architects and dePaor Architects, Cian has worked with Niall McLaughlin Architects and O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects. In 2008 TAKA became the youngest ever representatives of Ireland at the Venice Architectural Biennale as part of The Lives of Spaces exhibition. TAKA will co-curate the 2010 Irish Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architectural Biennale. Both Alice and Cian have been studio tutors at the UCD School of Architecture and Queens University Belfast.
Brick House, Dublin by TAKA Architects Photo by Alice Clancy
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(left) Victorian Flemish Bond (above) ‘Separated’ Flemish Bond TAKA
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Clontra Survey
Students undertook a comprehensive survey of Clontra House, Shankill, County Dublin. Designed by Deane and Woodward Architects the house was completed in 1860. On-site measurement, drawn and photographic documentation led to the production of a series of measured drawings which explored all aspects of the house, from construction details to the relationship to the exterior and gardens.
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Window in Plan and Elevation Robert Curley
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FOUNDATION / YEAR 1 / SEMESTER 2
234 (right) Plan of Entrance Hall, Clontra House John Nolan
(opposite) Section through Threshold, Clontra House Michelle Murphy
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Courtlife
Tutors Michael Pike Simon Walker
Students James Casey Caroline Kennedy Aisling Walker
Courtyards are an ancient spatial configuration, occurring in distinctive form in many regions of the world. This generic type of planning has retained its relevance by offering the possibility of dense urbanization and maximum land use, at the same time ensuring a direct contact with the two natural elements – earth beneath and sky above. The work of the group has focused on the search for new urban forms for the extension and consolidation of Irish towns based on the courtyard. These are deliberate counter-points to the omnipresent free-standing apartment blocks and scattered suburban houses that have come to surround almost every town in the country in the last ten years. Through the use of alternate covered rooms and rooms open to the sky these proposed settlements can be conceived as porous solids rather than compositions of individual blocks, allowing for deeper and more elaborate plan forms. The three students have selected towns of a similar scale in the environs of Dublin: Trim, Monasterevin and Rush. They have also chosen to work on the same brief: 20 dwellings and a combination of related community or work spaces. From this common base, however, the three approaches are very distinct.
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James Casey is working in the backlands of Trim and is concerned with the making of a more complex interwoven townscape that leads from the street edge through a sequence of courtyards to a common landscape beyond. The section is exploited to allow for large workspaces at ground level, with a series of dwellings held above a common access on the roof of the workshops. The courtyard becomes the device that unites these functions and levels.
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Trim Plan & Model James Casey
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Caroline Kennedy has been studying monasteries and is using this model to make a new form of community in Monasterevin, bringing farmers back into the town and organizing a series of dwellings and communal spaces around a sequence of courtyards. An existing mill building is re-used and forms the first episode in the spatial sequence. The courts become progressively more private as they move from a relationship to the town to a more direct connection with the wider landscape.
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Mill Entrance Caroline Kennedy
(opposite) Rush Plan & Model Aisling Walker
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Aisling Walker is working with the vast greenhouse structures of Rush and seeking a new form of occupation that combines living and growing within a single organism, an interlocking of house and greenhouse that is mutually beneficial to both. The housing therefore becomes an inhabited boundary to the greenhouses, forming courtyards that give scale to the huge structure, taking heat while providing a buffer.
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LANDSCAPE
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& MEMORY Cemetery, St Mullins, Co. Carlow Photo by Stephen Tierney
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INTERVIEW / KENNETH FRAMPTON
Kenneth Frampton Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
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Kenneth Frampton visited UCD on 4th and 5th March 2010, as a guest critic for the fifth year interim reviews, delivering a lecture to the School on 4th March. The following interview was conducted on the morning of 5th March.
Kenneth Frampton Photo by Stephen Tierney
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Lisa Cassidy: We had a lecture series over the past semester where members of staff presented on a landscape that interested them, whether it was a particular place or theme. One thing that arose was that it seemed to be very difficult for us to define landscape, while with the urban, nobody had any difficulty, but here landscape could be wilderness, or manmade, or the city, or...everything. Do you think the difficulty with defining landscape is representative of an issue for architecture? Kenneth Frampton: Well, I don’t think it necessarily has to be an issue. One could use the word topography, and when in the last edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, I thought I needed a series of categories in order to make sense of the recent past within the terms of the book. It begins with topography, morphology, sustainability and materiality. I used the word topography in order to refer to a landscape approach, to either building or to landscape or the two together, so I think you can in a sense overcome this dilemma by using the word topography. LC: You have referred to Siza describing the architect being specialised at non-specialisation, and the questions at the end of your lecture included discussion of education in Catalunya, with the landscape architect coming through architecture. Do you think this model is a good one? Is the architect’s
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role to be working with the landscape specialist, or to be engaging directly with the landscape themselves, or should it be integral, or...? KF: I’m not entirely sure about this, but I think that until very recently, there was no profession of landscape architect in Spain, so architects were in the habit of designing landscape. I remember many years ago, for reasons I can’t really explain, we used to have – and we do again now, but there was a period when we used to have a lot of students from Catalunya. I can remember in those days, for whatever reason, we looked at the portfolios of these applications before they came to the school – I’m not involved in that activity any more – but I noticed to my surprise that a lot of these portfolios contained projects that were really landscape projects, and that impressed me a lot. I think that in Spain there is a very strong sense of the importance of the ground, and I think that’s part of the story. LC: I wanted to ask you about [the Lovell Beach House]. With regard to landscape, you have written on the early 20th century in Los Angeles – Irving Gill, Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler, Neutra, the Usonian tradition – and the notion of the early precedent for bioclimatically responsive design. Do you think that we can still learn from that?
INTERVIEW / KENNETH FRAMPTON
KF: Yes. I mean, I think the figure that really stands out in all of this, in the sense that his concepts about landscape are more generalised in some sense, but also very precisely detailed, is Neutra. I think that Neutra’s attitude to garden design and landscape in relation to his work remains a model, and his drawings are particularly sensitive, his plans and his understanding of plant material. [...] There was always a particular landscape architect who worked with Neutra, a woman. and we do know that Neutra spent a year working with the Swiss landscape architect Gustav Ammann, so I think he was extremely sensitive to plant material and had a knowledge of plant material, more than Schindler, or Wright for that matter, because I think Wright always worked with landscape designers – Jens Jensen, for example, [...] a Chicago landscape architect.
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LC: I was interested when you were talking yesterday about the need for cultural research within architecture: “We talk about the global, but there’s all sorts of work done all over the world. Differences have been made or are being made, and we don’t know about them. [...] Even though we use this word ‘research’, and even though the university breathes down one’s neck with regard to doing hard enough research, their idea of research is techno-scientific, empirical, but there’s another kind – cultural, political research, which we don’t do very well, and if only we could improve on that,
it would be encouraging.” Would you see that being an interdisciplinary approach, or how would you imagine it working? KF: Well, I suppose it is interdisciplinary, but what I really have in mind is, I made this comment about Curitiba, but one could also say – not here maybe, but for elsewhere – Temple Bar, you know, that the story of Temple Bar and exactly who was involved in this, who were the prime movers in Temple Bar, what was the history of its development and what was involved in making this development successful. On a much larger scale, I think this is true of Curitiba. We do know that Jaime Lerner was the mayor of Curitiba for fifteen years, but we don’t know all the details of Curitiba and what was involved. And then there are other examples, such as [Enrique Penalosa and Antanas Mockus Sivickas], these two were successively mayors of Bogota, and they imported ideas from Curitiba into Bogota, and the centre of Bogota has been transformed, with bicycle ways and walkways and this transmillennial public transport that was modelled on the Curitiba service of public transport. So, the story of Bogota and Curitiba, for example, I think our knowledge of all of that, that kind of research is amazing because it would enable one to understand the political, the economic, the context that brings that kind of
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work into existence, so it would in that sense be interdisciplinary but doing the work at all would mean to talk to different actors.
of departure for thinking about a particular project, and I think that’s a slightly fragile... I was quite surprised by that.
LC: Finally, has anything in particular arisen in your first day of the Fifth Year review that’s struck you about the school or about the individual work?
LC: Would that be any different in Columbia?
KF: Coming from New York, and from Columbia, which is a school that is totally dominated by digital – I mean, nobody draws by hand anymore in Columbia, and in fact students are beginning to lack the capacity to draw by hand, and I think that’s a very disturbing development because the relationship between the hand and the head, this capacity to conceive an idea through sketching, this is a real loss not having that anymore. It’s very present here, of course – there is still hand-drawing and very much so, and that is very important and very impressive. This preoccupation with landscape in this particular studio is also equally important, and that’s, generally speaking, underemphasised in schooling in the States. The one thing I’m slightly critical of, and in some ways I’m very surprised by, is... I think there are, and in fact I’m sure there are very good teachers of history and theory in this school, but there’s a kind of schism which I think happens between the design studio and the theoretical courses. There’s a tendency for the students not to use historical precedent as a point
KF: No, it wouldn’t be, it’s an issue there as well, but I’m surprised in the context of this continuation of a very strong craft, drawing, hand-drawn ethos that’s in this school, I’m very surprised that the question of historical precedent is not more active in the thinking. I mean, we do teach history and theory at Columbia, and there’s also a thing there, somehow or other, I think it’s more understandable due to the emphasis on digital.
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Kenneth Frampton studied architecture at Guildford School of Art and the Architectural Association. In addition to working in practice in Israel and the UK, Frampton was technical editor of Architectural Design from 1962–5. Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York, and has taught at many other schools including the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, Princeton University, the Bartlett School of Architecture. Kenneth Frampton has written extensively on architecture, with publications including Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, and Labour, Work and Architecture.
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Landscape and Archive St Mullins Heritage Centre St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Peter Cody Chris Boyle Collaborators Bridie Lawlor Mary O’Neill
Students Timothy Brick Lisa Cassidy Sean Finegan Sorcha Kenneally Patrick McGrath Conor Morrissey Kieran Murray Orla Philips Sarah Prendergast Emilie Rigal Paul Seagault
The students undertook the design and construction of a new exhibition to rehouse an existing collection of artefacts. The exhibition is structured around ten separate story lines supported by a documented recording of local history from the 1938 schools project.
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(above) Exhibition structure drawing Group work
(opposite) Display structure assembled in church Photo by Lisa Cassidy
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
(left)
(opposite)
Assembling display structure in workshop
Year 4 Interim Review with Jan
Photo by Lisa Cassidy
Olav Jensen and John Tuomey Photo by Stephen Tierney
(right) Painting interior of 1811 church St Mullins Photo by Peter Cody
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ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
We tend to think of death as something finite, and to some extent it is, for it marks the incontrovertible end-point of someone’s mortal existence. But death also belongs to a process that is ongoing and without limits. It is inextricably linked to the cycles of regeneration and rebirth. Tumuli – ancient burial mounds – embody this condition in an unambiguous and yet remarkably profound way.
A Landscape of Eternal Dwelling Samantha Martin-McAuliffe
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Fig. 1 View from the tumulus towards the river valley and the western ridge.
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A burial mound is in the first instance a tomb, the final and hopefully permanent resting place for one or more individuals. Simultaneously it is also intrinsic to – literally ingrained within – the surrounding and ever changing landscape. How do we reconcile and make sense of this dichotomy between immutability and transformation? Generally, within the study of burial tumuli, the dead command most of our attention. The following essay explores as well as underscores the significance of the deceased, however, it will ultimately show that in tumuli the dead are principally important because their presence serves the living.1 The Lofkënd Archaeological Project in Albania Between 2007 and 2009 I participated in the Lofkënd Archaeological Project, the excavation of a prehistoric burial tumulus in Albania. The excavation was organised and run by a joint team from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Archaeology, Tirana, from 2004 to 2007. In total, the project uncovered in 85 graves
1 A longer discussion of this analysis is forthcoming in the final publication of the Lofkënd Archaeological Project (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2010, edited by John K. Papadopoulos, Sarah Morris, and Lorenc Bejko).
of the Late Bronze through Early Iron Ages, as well as 15 burials of humans and animals dating from recent Ottoman times (Papadopoulos et al. 2007). The tumulus at Lofkënd stands on a foothill that is ancillary to a large ridge of the Mallakastra Hills in western Albania. Extending in a south-westerly direction, the hill of the burial tumulus looks toward the valley of the Gjanicë River, which runs further to the south-west (fig. 1). Immediately beyond the river rises yet another imposing ridge stretching northwest-southeast. The view from the tumulus and the view towards it can change significantly depending on the place of observation. At times the tumulus appears to jut forth impressively from an uneven bluff, such as when it is viewed from the modern village to the immediate southeast (fig. 2). In contrast, when seen from the site of another burial tumulus, that of Mashkullora in the northwest, the Lofkënd tumulus takes the appearance of a protuberance growing atop a moderate incline (fig. 3). The varying perspectives onto the tumulus are important to consider not only because they ask us to question how the mound was seen in antiquity, but also because they remind us that the situation of this burial site is never part of a single, framed landscape; it can be understood from many perspectives. As we shall see, these
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perspectives are both literal and figurative. It is also worthwhile mentioning that following the excavation the tumulus was rebuilt in its original location, and all of the photographs included in this essay show the mound in its reconstructed state. Although the excavation of the Lofkënd tumulus has revealed a wealth of material finds, the identities of the entombed as well those responsible for the construction of the mound remain unobtainable at this point. We do know, however, that the tumulus was not built at once, but rather grew through accretion over an exceptionally long time period. Beyond this, other studies belonging to the archaeological project have suggested that the wider vicinity of the tumulus has been a site of human occupation for millennia. This situation raises many questions, both practical and philosophical: What did the tumulus represent for those groups or communities who used the land around it? Why was it used by successive generations? How might we understand it as a monument? What does it suggest about the thresholds and limits of time? A close reading of the tumulus within its setting can address all of these questions as well as reveal important clues about the wider significance of burial tumuli in general.
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ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
Marking the Land The burial tumulus at Lofkënd is essentially an intervention, something that is fabricated by the human hand and imposed onto the landscape. Its placement establishes orientation because it is perceived as a fixed topographic marker. And yet it is not something that necessarily delimits or circumscribes physical boundaries. Instead, we can understand it as an object that radiates influence. Rather than physically changing the ground on which it stands, the mound changes our interpretation and perception of the surrounding land (Papadopoulos 2006:83; see also Barrett 1999:256; Thomas 1991:30). This situation is crucial and can be comprehended more fully by looking beyond Lofkënd. Scholars working outside of archaeology have also commented on how inanimate objects may claim dominion over a locale and establish place (Tuan 1977:162; Harrison 2003:19) More than once, Wallace Stevens’ poem Anecdote of the Jar has been used to illustrate this phenomenon (Stevens 2006:66–67). It is worthwhile quoting a stanza from the poem in order to clarify how it relates to our present discussion: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
252 Fig. 2 View toward the tumulus from a village situated in the immediate southeast.
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The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes that the jar, like a sculpture, can in certain circumstances transcend its inanimate condition and “incarnate personhood” (Tuan 1977:162). The jar is lifeless and yet it is precisely this quality that transforms it into a “metaphor for human striving” (Tuan 1971:184). It becomes a representation, a symbol for the determination of an individual or a community to create place and establish authority over a particular locale. We can understand the jar in Steven’s poem as analogous to the burial tumulus at Lofkënd in two different yet connected ways. First of all, the mound has the capacity to lend tangibility to ephemeral things, such as identity. Because it was intentionally built by human hands it acts as a kind of shorthand for inhabitation in general. As such, it can be seen as a form of architecture that “localizes caring” for the land and permanently represents or refers those who dwelled in the vicinity of the tumulus over long periods of time (Casey 1993:175). Beyond this, the tumulus it is everlasting, or it at least transcends the finitude of those responsible for its construction. This suggests that it consecrates not only place, but also time. Ultimately, however, we must consider how the situation at Lofkënd is a great deal more complex than Stevens’ jar and Tennesseean hill. Far from being an empty vessel, or even an earthen sculpture, the burial tumulus is a receptacle for the dead.
Tumulus as Repository The Lofkënd tumulus is first and foremost a monument to the deceased. Tombs, graves and memorials to the dead are cultural universals. Because they are profound and yet a basic aspect of every community, they are also understood to be common. The tradition implied by graves means that they are typical, and perhaps this is why their deep-seated messages and contributions are frequently overlooked. In a very literal way, a marked burial serves the dead precisely because it is a receptacle for their remains. That these containers promised accommodation – a home – for the dead is attested by the earliest cultures (Colvin 1992). Apart from being a dwelling, a grave is commonly seen as a mark of respect, for the dead deserve an honorable burial. These conditions both focus on how graves serve the dead; what they offer those who have passed. They are undeniably important, but the gravity of their reverence can divert our attention away from exploring how graves can serve us, the living. We have no evidence to suggest that people died at the Lofkënd burial tumulus, and thus it is unlikely that this place marks profound – or even particular – moments in people’s lives. A more plausible hypothesis is that people were interred at Lofkënd as a kind of memorial, a remembrance of the past that specifically benefited the living. Burial
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tumuli, like monumental tombs, are purposefully visible for our sake, not for the sake of the dead. It is worthwhile mentioning that the Greek word for grave, sema, is also translated as sign (Harrison 2003:20; Thomas 2007:166). A grave must be visible so that the living may recognize it. As David Lowenthal has pointed out, although memorials refer to those who lay beneath them, “the marking function is no longer consequential once bodies have moldered into dust or have been removed to make way for others…Cemeteries matter less as repositories for the dead than as fields of remembrance for the living; the unmarked grave goes unseen” (Lowenthal 1979:123). However much the tumulus builders may have perceived their act as a form of respect for their ancestors, the mound ultimately provided solace and reassurance for those who survived. Because it is deliberately visible and durable, the burial mound embodies a twofold promise: It ensures that the living would have a place to recall their ancestors, a kind of aide-memoire that could trigger recollection. Its physical presence guarantees that the living could connect with their forebears in a tangible way. Furthermore, the monumentality of the burial imparts permanency, suggesting that the memories of the dead could be retrieved not merely in the immediate aftermath of interment, but also in perpetuity (Bradley 1985:9; Harrison 2003:39). As a veritable “mound
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of memory”, the tumulus contained the literal and metaphorical roots of the community, or communities, who used it (Papadopoulos 2006). In a way, the dead, although silent and inanimate, are a kind of community. Unlike the living, however, they have a remarkable staying power. Notably, the tumulus does not preserve the past itself, but what the past stood for – a particular social collective (Lowenthal 1979:121). In other words, the dead provide reassurance. By dwelling perpetually in a singular place they assert continuity (Harries 1998:310). If this tumulus at Lofkënd marks a territory that was once controlled by a specific community, then the presence of ancestors attests to that claim. Most importantly, the dead transcend the restrictions that inevitably challenge the living. Because their presence is not finite, they effectively promise to inhabit and oversee the land forevermore. The dead, as Robert Harrison has argued, can assert extraordinary authority over the land: “The surest way to take possession of a place and secure it as one’s own is to bury one’s dead in it” (Harrison 2003:24). We may refer to the tumulus at Lofkënd as a gravesite, but it is not simply an area of land, a plot set aside for the deceased. The fundamental and lasting value of this place is wholly contingent upon its exterior appearance. In contrast to the hill on which it stands, the burial swells and bulges, projecting upward and outward from a slope. The
ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-MCAULIFFE
profile of the mound immediately suggests its role as a kind of vessel, and although it is essentially composed of natural material, its shape discloses that it is man-made. It is exactly this juxtaposition of contours that draws attention to the tumulus and signals its presence, thereby communicating to us that it is architecture. Adolph Loos observed this elemental condition of building and making when he remarked that “[i]f we find a mound in the forest, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped up with a spade in the shape of a pyramid, then we become solemn and something tells us: somebody lies buried here – this is architecture!” (quoted in Harries 1998:292). Loos’ comment underscores the importance of deliberate construction in our interpretation of architecture. The tumulus at Lofkënd may outwardly look very different from a mausoleum composed of cut-stone, yet both are intentional repositories for the dead; neither expresses this essential quality more than the other.
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Afterlife Like any monumental tomb, the Lofkënd tumulus possesses the capacity to link the living with previous generations. But it is also important to think about how the mound is a place attuned to what lies beyond the Gjanicë river valley, both in terms of time and space. As an axis mundi, or universal pillar, the tumulus ensures a fixed and
permanent connection with the sky. In some sense, one could contend that this mound is also a kind of cosmic mountain, a tangible image that strives for and confirms a relationship between the inhabited world and the heavens. It is vital, however, to acknowledge and be mindful of how this tumulus is not situated at the highest point of elevation in the valley. The precise reasons for this are unknown, although we may be able to surmise that the summits of the mountain ridges were the domains of immortals. Nonetheless, to ask why the Lofkënd tumulus is not on a mountaintop would effectively deny its fundamental purpose: to house humans. This mound, while sacred and intimately connected to ritual, was not a temple or abode for the gods. It unambiguously belonged to this world as a place established for mortals, and we must continue to think of it as such (Harrison 2001:398). It is surely more useful and potentially fruitful to explore the deeper significance of why this tumulus is located between the mountain ridges and the valley floor. In what ways may we describe or articulate the relationship between this kind of place and the world above it? Here it is constructive to use Anecdote of the Jar once again as a vehicle for investigation. My aim in using this poem is not to uncover the absolute meaning of the tumulus – an impossible task – but instead to re-evaluate the symbolic boundaries associated with tumuli in general. At the end of
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255 Fig. 3 Morning view toward the tumulus from the northwest; the eastern ridge of the river valley runs behind the foothill of the burial mound.
the second stanza of the poem, Stevens writes: “The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air” (Stevens 2006:66–67). Earlier in this essay I commented upon the emptiness of the jar, and importantly, the quality of expectation that this condition imparts. The vessel, rather than being dispossessed of contents, is instead full of potential. And furthermore, as a “port in air” the jar can also be interpreted as an aperture or gateway. It remains moored to one place but is undeniably associated with passage and movement. All ports, real and imagined, necessarily embody this duality. To some extent, a tumulus can be viewed as a final destination, a ‘harbour’ or place of interment for one’s remains. This is likely one reason why a burial mound is such a useful device for claiming possession of particular piece or section of land. While it can be described as a receptacle, a container for the dead, it is simultaneously understood as a point of departure. The tumulus thereby signifies passage into a different existence, the underworld and afterlife. Even when it was largely abandoned as a gravesite it still formed part of the greater landscape of the Gjanicë River valley. In other words, it was part of the natural habitat of the area, a ‘living’ monument. It is also worthwhile noting that although the identities of the original tumulus builders and dwellers were lost over time, the general, fundamental meaning of this place
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Fig. 4 View towards the tumulus from the south; the modern cemetery with white tombstones is located just below the hill of the mound, toward the right side of the photograph.
was ultimately unchangeable: It continued to embody a sense of sacredness (cf. Tuan 1977:164). Examining the immediate vicinity of the mound can corroborate this situation. Just below the hill on which the tumulus was built stands a modern cemetery for the local community (fig. 4). The proximity and placement of this new burial ground appears to be a deliberate attempt to harness or subsume the inviolability of the prehistoric tumulus. As such, the graveyard is both a continuation and recreation of a hallowed site. The LofkĂŤnd Archaeological Project itself has specifically addressed how the tumulus may remain as a nexus of human interaction and encounters. Following excavation, the mound was rebuilt to its original height and size (Papadopoulos 2008). The reconstruction has literally reactivated the monument, assuring that it will continue to be a place of connection between the past, present and future. Ultimately it is impossible to know for certain what lies in store for the mound at LofkĂŤnd. However, we can imagine that generations from now the tumulus may continue to exude stature, and that the memories of the dead might still beckon.
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Bibliography: J. C. Barrett, The Mythical Landscapes of the British Iron Age,
M. Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, in: Poetry,
C. Tilley, The Power of Rocks. Topography and Monument
in: W. Ashmore – A. Bernard Knapp (eds.), Archaeologies of
Language, Thought (New York 1971) 141–160
Construction on Bodmin Moor, World Archaeology
Landscape. Contemporary Perspectives (Malden 1999) 253–265 R. Bradley, The Significance of Monuments (London 1998)
D. Lowenthal, Age and Artifact: Dilemmas of Appreciation,
28.2, 1996, Sacred Geography, 161–176
in: D. W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretations of Ordinary
C. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places,
Landscapes. Geographical Essays (Oxford 1979) 103–28
Paths and Monuments (Oxford 1994)
The Archaeology of Monuments and the Archaeology of Deliberate
J.K. Papadopoulos, Mounds of Memory. Burial Tumuli in the Illyrian
Y. Tuan, Space and Place. The Perspective of
Deposits, in: Two Munro Lectures given at the University of
Landscape, in: L. Bejko – R. Hodges (eds.) New directions in Albanian
Experience (Minneapolis 1977)
Edinburgh on 27th and 28th November 1984 (Edinburgh 1985)
Archaeology. Studies presented to Muzafer Korkuti. International Centre
R. Bradley, Consumption, Change and the Archaeological Record.
J. Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton 1981) E. Casey, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History (Berkeley 1998) E. Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world (Bloomington 1993) H. Colvin, Architecture and Afterlife (New Haven 1992) M Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York 1957) H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method2 (London 1989) K. Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA 1997) R.P. Harrison, Hic Jacet, Critical Inquiry 27.3, 2001, 393–407 R.P. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago 2003)
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for Albanian Archaeology Monograph Series 1 (Tirana 2006) 75–84 J. K. Papadopoulos – Sarah Morris – Lorenc Bejko, Reconstructing the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofkënd in Albania, Antiquity 82, 2008, 1–16 J. K. Papadopoulos – Sarah Morris – Lorenc Bejko, Excavations at the Prehistoric Burial Tumulus of Lofkënd in Albania. A Preliminary Report for the 2004–2005 Seasons, AJA 111.1, 2007, 105–147 W. Stevens, Collected Poems (London 2006) E. Thomas, Monumentality and the Roman Empire. Architecture in the Antonine Age (Oxford 2007) J. Thomas, Rethinking the Neolithic (Cambridge 1991)
Y. Tuan, Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature, Canadian Geographer 15, 1971,181–192
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY
UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Project for a Burial Place St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Marcus Donaghy Mary Laheen
Students Brian Barber Ciaran Conlon Lukas Eugler Caroline Kiernan Maria Mulcahy Meabh McCarty Timothy Murphy Luke O’Callaghan Robert Tobin Enida Skalonjic Patrick Stack Lena Steinbuch Anna Zabiegala
Site section Maria Mulcahy
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Extension of St Mullins Cemetery St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Stephen Tierney
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(left) Site plan (opposite) Model Enda Naughton
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Continuity
Tutors Will Dimond Kevin Donovan
Students Dominic Lavelle Cliodhna Rice
A garden is an example of a suitable arena. For gardening is itself a synthesis of explorations, requiring the gardener to be craftsman, scientist and artist… Also intelligent enough to keep these roles and qualities in balance: for a weak imagination can be overpowered by unremitting craftsmanship to give a trivial pretty-pretty display; or by too forceful intellect to offer mere rhetoric…from Harvesting the Edge, G.F. Dutton, gardener, scientist, poet, mountaineer and wild-water swimmer
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In the twentieth century, economic pressures, vested interests and incoherent planning structures have conspired to threaten our urban and rural environments with poor quality development. The natural and man-made systems that have supported our inhabitation of city and countryside, once driven by necessity and economy, have been allowed to fragment, and have become increasingly suppressed or erased. Continuity examines this frayed context and asks how we can bring about positive change; how can we make an architecture that is continuous, shared and rooted? In employing a diverse range of studies to unravel the landscape, our group aspires to make robust and enduring work that both exploits and complements its place.
(left)
Interested initially in the feeling of place,
is proposing the integration of this traditionally
Development sketch
transmitted through occupancy and the
rural system of living into the semi-urban
(opposite)
weathering of materials, Dominic Lavelle,
setting of Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. Through
Site plan
surveyed a dilapidated mill and in the
a series of buildings and productive gardens,
Dominic Lavelle
countryside of south Co. Kilkenny, using a
some existing and reused, he hopes to re-
combination of analytical and atmospheric
establish erased links in both building fabric
drawings. Meanwhile, a concern with the
and community, operating primarily on the
psychological effect of material and making
thick threshold between privacy and publicity
on the inhabitants of buildings and landscape
to integrate a new community in an existing
led to research into Camphill Communities’
wider social framework.
centers for people with special needs. Dominic
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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5
Cliodhna Rice began her exploration of the relationship of domestic space to its environment in a number of sectional models of precedents, drawing on her experience of a semester’s study in Norway. An interest in landscape with continuous but evolving and diverse inhabitation brought her to isolate a site at the confluence of two lakes in the drumlins of Co. Cavan. Having made primer projects based on minimal intervention but heightened effect, she is proposing to make an inn that responds to the continuous horizontal datum of water and the verticality of forest and vernacular construction. The inn will gather the various uses of the territory in a complex building, whilst dealing with issues of topography, landscape and ecology, in their broadest sense.
264 (left) Site plan (right) Site reflection Cliodhna Rice
(opposite) Year 4 reviews Photo by Alice Clancy
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WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 2
Model Photography Workshop
A workshop exploring model photography was held for Upper School students in the second semester. Led by Alice Clancy and Stephen Tierney, the afternoon sessions involved discussion on representation and the production of imagery and was supplemented by hands-on demonstrations of camera and darkroom techniques.
Group photography collaboration Photos by Su Wang
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INTERVIEW / PETER KEALY
Peter Kealy Interview Lisa Cassidy Year 4
Peter Kealy is a farmer, living in a former rambling house between Ballycrinegan and Dranagh, Co. Carlow. In 1938, he participated in the 1938 Schools Project, writing essays on folklore and local stories for the Irish Folklore Commission. Kealy continues to tell stories and play the accordion at regular events in Carlow and Wexford.
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Peter Kealy Photo by Frank Clarke, Local Historian
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Lisa Cassidy: You took part in the 1938 project in school, writing about folklore and life at the time. […] I was looking at the stories you would all have written, about St Moling, and the graveyard, and… Peter Kealy: The folklore, is that what you’re saying? As we called it at that time, twas folklore. LC: Can you tell me about that? PK: Well, like you were explaining, the youngsters, well in my class anyway – the higher classes, the adult classes, they’d be asked to write something on a bit of folklore or the like, on the area or what they heard around the fire at home, when we were going to school or doing our copybook and that. That’s what you’re interested in? LC: That’s it. PK: So, like, we all had to write a bit of folklore and do something like that, you know. So whether it was all the truth or what – part of it would be the truth, you know. Maybe when those lads, the ramblers around the fire, when they’d find out the young lads, what they wanted, they might add a little bit to it, but still it was all the truth, like, or most of it would be the truth. Only there’d be a bit of trimmings, as I’d call it.
LC: Can you tell me about the ramblers and the rambling house? PK: Well, the rambling house, the people used to come in and they’d sit around the fire, and they’d be talking and telling about this, that and the other. At that time, there’d be no television or radio or a damn thing like that, you know. They’d have the news of the day.
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I was born here, where we are now, and it’s the border of two townlands – Dranagh is over here and Ballycrinegan is down here and it would take in a stretch of maybe three to four miles, you know. And there’d be someone from that end here, and it would be a kind of rambling house and a meeting place, more or less, because there was always somebody here, and they’d have the news of the day, like if someone was dead or dying or sick, and then they’d be in last night and there’d be someone going to the fair or the market today from one end, and they’d be in the next night for to find out the prices of everything and that, that’s the way they had of meeting and finding out everything and communicating with the outside world, is the only way I could say it. LC: How would the family that owned the house decide to open it? How did a rambling house start, in a particular hosue?
PK: Well, I suppose the way it started was we were here on the border of two townlands and the neighbours from each side, there were different places but this was one of them here, because we were central, it’s like that. LC: And when did it stop? PK: Jesus, it didn’t stop for years, I might as well tell you the truth. When I started to grow up and the brothers and sisters were here, it still went on. The younger people then when they started coming, it was a place here where… I was handy, I used to cut hair, so on a Sautrday night there could be five, six, eight here waiting for a haircut on a Saturday night at eleven o’clock. And then after that, the younger people were coming in and maybe the sisters here, they’d have some friends, and they’d be somebody here, friends, some girls, and you know for yourself that where there were girls there were always boys. I used to be playing a bit of music when I was growing up, and of course on a Saturday, maybe at one o’clock, the hair would be finished cutting and the box would come down, the music, there’d be a half-set or a waltz or something danced before they’d all have us scattered. That’s the way it carried on, until such time that the brothers and sisters got married and then it did out. LC: That must have been great.
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PK: Ah, sure, yeah. LC: And you now have the meeting every two weeks….
INTERVIEW / PETER KEALY
and play music and it’s great, great entertainment. Something like what went on years ago, telling stories and a few yarns and all the rest of it. LC: Who runs that?
PK: We do have meetings down here. Frank is the headmaster, as we call him. It was Frank that started off the history group, and this is all renewed again. LC: Telling stories, and… PK: That’s right, it’s all renewed again, things from the past and it’s all gone down in history again, it’s carrying on. Frank is great that way, like. LC: He’s very interested. PK: He’s very interested, that’s it, and he’s after bringing up an awful lot of things. So, that’s the history of the rambling house. The lads would be around the fire, and maybe there’d be a song, and it was a house where everyone in the family could sing a song, and you might say that’s carried on with myself. All over the county of Wexford down here they have what they call the Rambling House, there was one last Friday night and there’s several of them, there’s sixteen calendar nights in the month in county Wexford, what they call the Rambling House, you know, and someone will sing a song
PK: Sure, different people, all over. I told you there’s fifteen or sixteen calendar nights in the month in different places, so I go to them as well.
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about the banshee. When they’d go out at maybe eleven or twelve o’clock on a winter’s night, they’d be talking about somebody that was sick, and maybe they’d say he or she is not expected by morning, and when they’d go out in the dark of night, the first thing they’d do was listen to see would they hear the banshee, and if they heard the banshee on their way home from rambling, that’s, he or she would be dead by morning, and it’d all be the truth, it would happen. Wherever she’s gone now, I don’t know.
LC: Would you tell stories or sing, or everything? PK: Ah yeah. Different people would be called on to sing a song. There’d be ten or twelve musicians in it. Great pastime for a night, for somebody that don’t be doing anything else. I wouldn’t be a television fan now at all. I’d never see television. Well, I would, but with regard to sitting down and watching a film, I’d have no interest in them. LC: What music do you play?
[…] PK: This was a rambling house, like I said. That time, we were going to school, and there was no electric light, no nothing. We’d be sitting there at the table and an old oil lamp hanging there on the wall, and you’d see your hand. The ramblers would be around the fire and they’d be talking, and you’d be trying to do your homework but you’d one ear cocked, you know the way young lads would be at that time. Different than now.
PK: I play the accordion, the button accordion. LC: Were the ramblers from other towns? LC: In the history group, what stories do people like the most? PK: Ah sure, Jesus, they’d be talking about every bloody thing. I often saw them here and they’d be around the fire and at that time they’d be talking
PK: Ah, from the two townlands at each side of us, that’s all. Maybe someplace else, there’d be an odd one in. They’d come for to meet and to have the old chat. That’s the way it was in those days, big changes now.
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LC: Still the interest in the stories and music, though. People still like them. PK: We had an uncle and he used to play the violin, and he’d come here maybe once a week, and everyone in the family was a singer. My mother was a good singer too. Friday night was the big night of the week because we’d have no school on Saturday, and there was another neighbour down here, the lane, and he was a good singer, and we learned all the songs from him, and divil knows what. Especially that time, sixty, seventy years ago, after the Civil War and that, they sang all the patriotic songs, republican songs, and they were the ones they had at that time. There was no Bonos or Beatles in those days. So we’d be looking forward to Friday night and we’d be up all night singing away, learning the songs, we’d nothing else to do. LC: It sounds pretty good. Would there be food? PK: Food? Jesus. That time, the skillet pot would be hanging over the fire, a pot of stirabout, and I remember there was one fella who used to come in here, and that time everyone used to churn and make their own butter, and what have you, and he’d have a mug of buttermilk, and the skillet would never be taken from over the fire, and he’d dip into the pot of stirabout. I used to love it myself as well. I often saw him, when he’d be finishing up and he’d give me
another sup of milk now, and he’d say “God bless the cow that milked it.” Twas a saying I never heard with anybody, twas a lovely saying, and he’d be after drinking, and, “God bless the cow that milked it.” Everyone was baking their own bread and the bread would be baking there in the night and the mother would be baking the bread and then there’d be the pot of stirabout. There’d be no fancy currant buns or anything like that. All big strong healthy men.
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LC: Would your family all have been farmers? PK: Ah yeah. […]
Did I ever think that something that I wrote or done years ago when I was going to school, that I’d be able to read it now again. […] So now this is coming along, and this is going to be a renewal again, and it’ll be there in another six hundred years again. Sure, that time, people don’t know – there were no cars, my father never had a bicycle. He never rode a bicycle, my father, and no cars, that’s all people had. They had no other communication with the outside world, only they heard from one to the other, the news would be brought, at least three miles from one end of the townland to the other and there’d always be somebody in, and they’d know that, what night I’d be in and maybe what night you’d be in, everyone wouldn’t be in the one night.
LC: When did you get radio? PK: By God, I couldn’t tell you, it would be around… jesus, I suppose it’d be damn near the mid-forties when we had the radio. I remember the first ones, there was one down here in Ballycrinegan, and there was one over here, and when the matches would come and the all-Ireland final and all, and everyone would flock to the radio to hear the matches. I remember one, there was a fella who’d been at the match, and Galway and Kerry were after kicking in an all-Ireland final, and I don’t know which of them won, but those two fellas met that night here, they were talking to the match, and this fella said Galway won. The other said, they didn’t, Kerry won. One of them listening to it in each place you see, and this fella says, sure by God, the radio I was listening to, Galway won, and they had a dispute. That’s as much as I can tell you about the bloody thing. I tell you, there were more people going through that door over the years. Nobody now. Sure, there’d be only one in every house, the way the population has gone. Strange, different times. You were born in the city were you? LC: I was. PK: Sure, you’d have a different life, that’d be very different.
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
Rambling House and Music School St Mullins, Co. Carlow
Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Stephen Tierney
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(right) Ground floor plan (opposite) Site plan Donnacha O’Brien
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UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2
274 (above) Axonometric of passage and stairs (right) Section 1:20 Donnacha O’Brien
(opposite) Site model Photo by Alice Clancy
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TRIBUTE /JIM MURPHY
Jim Murphy A Tribute Loughlin Kealy Emeritus Professor of Architecture UCD
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Jim Murphy Photo by Alice Clancy
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It would seem easy enough to write about Jim Murphy in terms of his work in teaching. Most of his professional life from graduation until his retirement from the School was shaped by his involvement in architectural education, primarily in the studio – about 1500 former students could write with as much authority as anyone.
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Jim taught at UCD from 1973 to 2009. He has taught throughout the school, but it is his time in the third year that, for me at least, captures best the qualities he brought to his teaching work. The third year of study has a particular character and intensity – I remember it well from my own time as a student, and that was long before it became a degree year. Whatever its structure, it implies a crossover point within the programme – a transition. Jim had a clear vision of what was needed in developing architectural thinking in students, sharpening that focus at a key stage of the programme. He brought keen discernment
to the discussion at crits, his calm but sure interventions always finding the seam. He was Year Master for many years, working with different groups of colleagues to maintain a coherent direction at this critical stage in the educational cycle. But there are also other, less well known aspects of his life in academia: his role in the modularisation of programmes; his work in assisting the UCD Architecture programme in La Coruna and his role in leading Architecture as Dean. Taken together, they portray an academic contribution of depth and significance, in which
his quiet intelligence, wit and good humour were instrumental in a time of major change. I feel I can write about the first two in particular with an appreciation based on shared experience – his role as Dean followed my retirement from the school. The exercise of his qualities found a challenging theatre in the changes introduced in the university throughout the re-structuring and modularisation upheavals. Re-structuring was controversial for Architecture as for many other disciplines. The modularisation of programmes across the university was not unanimously welcomed either. In Architecture, while there were misgivings, the approach taken to modularisation was to be proactive – to use the process as a means of realigning aspects of the curriculum. It meant we had to examine options, appraise how essential content could be incorporated, and adapt to a different way of thinking about educational strategies – moving away from idea of knowledge to be inculcated to the idea of the abilities that a student had to attain. Taking that approach from the beginning meant that when the special requirements of Architecture were put forward, there was a willingness to listen. But the business of bringing exemptions and special provisions from expressions of principle to becoming structures and programmes that would be accepted, meant that we had to negotiate through the thicket of emerging regulations and committees that were themselves sometimes unsure of their own
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footing. The timescale insisted on by the university made completing the modularisation process more intensive that it needed to be, although perhaps little would have been gained by prolonging the matter. Jim and I worked closely in parallel. His skills allowed him to navigate between the requirements of our programmes, which were sometimes only as tidily repackaged as we could manage in the time, a computer system that was still working through its own glitches, and the apprehensions of committee members who thought Architecture was getting away with murder. To this day I am still in admiration of his skill and quiet intelligence. He managed the various tasks with such grace that objections faded into acceptance. But there is more to it than that. His achievement not only allowed us to move through this period in a way that laid the ground for further innovation, but I believe it also prepared the ground for others to work towards a more tolerant and sophisticated modularisation framework in their disciplines and through the university as a whole. When we were approached about setting up the UCD Architecture programme at CESUGA, La Coruna in Galicia, my first reaction was a mixture of excitement and caution. The then Executive of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture was not particularly keen. The project in Galicia was led by the Faculty of Commerce, and there was a tangible coolness on the part of some elements in Engineering towards the culture and modus
TRIBUTE /JIM MURPHY
operandi of Commerce as these were understood. We had issues of our own in the school. However, from contact with the people involved in Spain and discussions among colleagues as the idea of the collaboration matured, it seemed that the balance of advantage lay in going with the experiment. The venture could provide an exciting way of re-thinking our own programme, it would provide additional resources to Architecture that were badly needed, and it had the potential to provide a source of postgraduate students in the longer term. Jim was among the first to embrace the idea and the challenge. As matters developed, it would have struggled without him. Developing an architecture programme in the context of a young institution, with inexperienced teachers and with our mutual limitations regarding each other’s language, produced situations that are funny in retrospect, but that were tricky enough at the time. Apart from the content, which is different from what the staff had experienced themselves, there were questions of mindset and of studio-based teaching that were hard to communicate. Jim’s ability to identify points of familiarity that could be built on, his good humour, ease and clarity meant that problems were never allowed to become issues, and diificulties could always be approached in ways that induced solutions. As the engagement developed, Spanish perspectives wove their way into how the programme was conceived: the concern for the wider context
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and its ordering; the relation between landscape and building; the integration of design and realisation within the studio project – all concerns that also echoed Jim’s own thinking, have formed a special character to UCD Architecture in Galicia. Jim has always worn his learning lightly and exercised his authority quietly, efficiently and with empathy. People love his quick-witted, congenial company. They quickly know him to be wise and able. When they know him better they can find that he is not easily deflected and has an ability to produce the unexpected route – a man that knows his own ground. He has been at the core of development of Architecture at UCD. He continues in quasi retirement to break new ground in professional education. It is a great privilege to have worked with him. Ad multos annos.
Jim Murphy’s Retirement Presentation Photo by Alice Clancy
Acknowledgements The editors and yearbook team would like to thank all staff and students of UCD Architecture who made suggestions, contributions and their work available for the production of this Yearbook. Special thanks is also due to all visitors and guests who have also made contributions to UCD Architecture in 2009–10 and subsequently to this publication. In particular we thank: Marina Aldrovandi; Stephen Bates; Gary Boyd; Denis Byrne; Peter Carroll; Douglas Carson; Lisa Cassidy; Andrew Clancy; Tom dePaor; Theo Dorgan; Fergal Doyle; Kenneth Frampton; Elizabeth Hatz; Tom Holbrook; Susan Hussein; Jan Olav Jensen; Edward Jones; Fergal Joyce; Loughlin Kealy; Peter Kealy; Ronan Kenny; Steven Larkin; Patrick Lydon; Niall McCullough; Philip McGlade; Niall McLoughlin; Shelley McNamara; John McPolin; Colm Moore; Sarah Mulrooney; Michael McGarry; Siobhan Ni Eanaigh; Ross Cahill O’Brien; Sandra O’Connell; Robert Payne; Tim Robinson; Peter Salter; Jimi Shields; Dougal Sheridan; Sarah Sheridan; Rhonda Tidy; Billie Tsien; Brian Ward and Tod Williams.
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