The site is on the River at the Ha penny Bridge, opposite the old Woollen mills. The project divided itself into three parts: A theatre, a school and a public space. A long wall building connected the theatre to the school and acted as circulation between the two. Designed as a four storey height top lit galley, the sets were made, moved and stored in this space. This long building ran the length of the site from the river front to Liffey Street. It provided a backdrop for the school building and for the black box theatre. The building formed a public space with the Woollen Mills which fronted onto the river and connected to Temple Bar via the Ha’penny bridge and Merchants Arch. The public space was envisaged as a performance space connected to the Theatre and school. A secret garden occupies one of the four quadrants of the school building. www.tracystaunton.ie
Project school: University College Dublin (UCD)
Queer Coded
Queer Coded is a thesis project concerned with queer infrastructure in Dublin city and the architectural signifiers which reveal queer space. The primary design is situated on Bow Street in Smithfield between an abandoned dormitory building for the old Jameson distillery workers and an industrial block formerly the Crean Soap Factory. The work explores different approaches in designing queer space based on queer theory, various levels of coding, and a brief derived from the needs of existing LGBT+ organisations in the city (Outhouse and TENI). A written dissertation titled ‘Queer Domesticities’ was also created early in the process. Beginning with in depth theoretical and historical research allowed the design of this project to develop more naturally from an established understanding of queer space. The main spaces focused on are for a queer crisis and community center including emergency care and treatment, short term and long term housing, spaces of public engagement and protest, and event/club spaces to raise money for a grassroots approach to queer urban development. Rather than creating new monuments in the city to signify queer space, the existing network of churches are coded as the primary long ranged signifiers of new queer spaces. One of these new queer spaces is designed here to be a space both obscure and as a space of visible protest drawing from queer squatting + protest architectures. The proposal avoids flattening the site to build new queer space but instead allows a ‘queering’ of the existing buildings to take place. There is a push back against binary construction and conservation techniques, instead embedding new queer production within the complexity of the city.
DNA: Dublin Network Architecture
Post Graduate Architectural Thesis Report: An organisational typology and transit masterplan to provide for tomorrow’s mass transit in dublin’s city centre while conserving the historic and cultural districts in the context of global climate change and conflict.
Pub on Halston Street
The project takes on a back land site south of Dorset Street, Dublin 7, with entrances on to Anne’s Street North, Ball’s Lane and Halston Street. The programme is a meeting house or town hall that conceals its size from the surrounding streets. From Anne St North you enter a small bar and from there move through a series of rooms; lounge, dining room, garden, etc., until you reach the Hall. From Ball’s Lane you come through a narrow lane into a courtyard garden and on through the sequence of rooms. From Halston Street, a doorway in an almost blank façade leads in to the garden and on. The sequence culminates in a window that looks back out over the city.
Each room has a fireplace, alcoves and recesses making more nested spaces.
The range and dimension of rooms was influenced by a survey of Dublin pubs and cafes and a wider study of international precedent projects that provide a place to gather at different scales.
The aspiration of the project was to take on the role of the pub in civic life and to expand upon it without losing a sense of seclusion and intimacy. To make space for solitude and celebration in public life.
Living, In-between
My thesis investigates an alternative to the profit-driven development that currently shapes the housing market in Dublin City. I am proposing a new housing typology and development model to provide a collective and affordable way of living. The site chosen for this investigation currently sits vacant in the North Inner City.
The scheme consists of 16 dwellings over four floors with shared functions and a communal garden at street level. The dwellings vary in size from 69 m2 to 155 m2 in order to invite a mixture of household sizes and profiles. The dwellings are generous in size allowing the typology to sit somewhere in-between high-density city apartments and suburban housing.
The plan opposite shows two apartments and an external circulation core. Different coloured ceramic floor tiles spill out from each apartment into the shared circulation space creating different levels of threshold and ownership.
In both shared and private areas the design proposes generosity of space, encouraging freedom of use. The design aims to give people as much from the architecture as possible before they can appropriate it themselves.
The shared external circulation functions as a social meeting space for residents and allows for a gradual transition from city to dwelling. The design invites residents to take ownership of this space, occupy it and use it as an extension of the individual dwellings. The collage model below explores this concept.
Reuse. Recycle. Return. Adaptive Reuse of Redundant Structures
The body of work proposes a new vision for the city, reinvigorating existing structures through their reuse into new frameworks for urban living. In doing so this thesis also confronts pressing contemporary issues such as the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic which has changed our relationships with the places we live and work.
By reusing existing buildings in Dublin City a balance is struck between environmental stewardship and the shifting domestic landscape. Careful consideration of existing buildings in the city leads to a manifesto in pursuit of a new Urban Habitat, exploring how the buildings of today can be adapted for tomorrow. This is explored though a case study of Construction House along the canal between Rathmines and Ranelagh, currently home to the Construction Industry Federation. By examining how this building could be converted into a residential area that fosters creativity and community through the integration of lived and worked spaces, a strategy can be developed to transform similar 1970’s office buildings throughout Dublin.
Examining Construction House confronts not only how we might re-use existing buildings to address the housing and environmental crises, but also interrogates the conflation of home and professional occupation brought to the fore by the pandemic.
Reuse. Recycle. Return. Developing a strategy for the adaptive reuse of a redundant building typology that will address the climate crisis and pandemic in tandem.
Soccer Stadium
For a person who can’t even play football, a soccer stadium might seem like a strange choice of programme for a thesis. But when I began the project at the start of 1992, following an initial semester of group work focused on the “western gateway” to the city, around Heuston Station, the country was still basking in the glory of our exploits at Italia ’90. Most of all, a stadium seemed to me to be a valid vehicle – a large building, full of people – for the pursuit of a thesis on architecture.
I could concentrate on structure and space, physical context and topography, while at the same time, perhaps indirectly, invoking history, urbanism and society. The site, roughly in the original location of St. James’ Gate, occupies the east-facing slope leading down from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham to Dr. Steeven’s Hospital [both C17th buildings] and the entrance to Heuston Station.
Most stadia are approximately symmetrical, but the sloping site presented me with an unavoidably asymmetrical stadium. Looking for a reference for this, I started with the 12 stadia built specifically for Italia ’90 – in the end I found a stadium outside Madrid called “la Peineta” by Cruz y Ortiz. This is a large concrete plate on one side, to provide seating, supported on three concentric concrete walls below.
I adapted this idea to the St. James’ site, the concentric walls directing traffic in from the main road into an underground car-park. Above this internal “road”, the top-lit “canyon” formed between the concrete walls and the hillside contained all of the changing rooms and hospitality functions. The main body of seating sat on top of the walls [as per Cruz y Ortiz], fed by staircases from below, and covered by a large roof following the angle of the slope and supported by an 80-metre arched truss, spanning from north to south ends.
At the eastern side of the site, an open-to-air smaller tribune, provides seating facing west. Behind this, a covered coach-park and main pedestrian access, appears from above as a landscape of varied smaller roof forms, like scattered leaves. Total capacity is 65,000 seats.
Common Ground
I have been exploring the Sligo ground.
Exploring the ground as a deposition of a multiplicity of narratives and texts, ranging from mythology, to archaeology, to geology, to the poetry of Yeats, to contemporary tourist brochures.
Exploring the ground as a source of discovered space.
Exploring the ground as a source of meanings that can be transformed and connected to through building. The act of building must, of its essence, mark the ground, depositing another layer of representation and adding to the complex multiplicity of readings with which this ground is imbued.
I have been exploring how this can be achieved in a meaningful way so as to achieve a resonance with this place.
The house project is sited in the amazing Glen which cuts through the terrain for a mile and a half on the south side of Knocknarea, and which was written about by Yeats. The project was about responding to this by making an incision into the ground. In this way the form of the building was made by this manipulation of the ground and then a series of tectonic planes were added to articulate the spaces and control the views through and across these spaces to the wider landscape.
The subject for the thesis is then a community school and the site is on the other side of Knocknarea, just above Strandhill. The site is located where the field system breaks down and the mountain begins, and is also on a stratigraphical boundary where the hard limestone of the mountain changes to the softer rock and shale below. There are two eighth or ninth century ringforts adjacent to the site.
The thesis has therefore been an exploration of how to achieve a resonance with this place and with these narratives that are contained in this ground. I have attempted to make this artificial landscape using concrete as a kind of third geology, that is inserted between the two landscapes and begins to act as a threshold between them, with one side being buried and the other built up to respond to the different edges.
(Re)making_City
Method _
Remaking a piece of found ground in Dublin City through subtraction. To excavate and take advantage of existing site conditions and pieces of the city’s history which have been left behind in the wake of new developments. The idea that a building is not a static object but that it has a life of its own and that this could be conveyed through its form, skin or use.
Proposal _
To retain the old theatre entrance on Longford Street and to stitch it back into the fabric of both the place and the city. To fold the existing boundary wall on Stephen Street back into the site, allowing the fold to act as both an entrance and more importantly to address the Georgian Townhouse opposite. This move provides new breathing space to both the house and the street, and also creates new public ground in the city, partly sheltered by the overhanging studios and the foliage of the red birch trees contained within the sunken garden.
The programme is a bronze foundry consisting of a large courtyard and a series of different scale workshops. This poche space contained at the centre of the block acts as a workyard for the foundry and also provides breathing space for the programme and the city.
Contemporary Commons
In suburbia, the morphology of the housing estate monopolises programme.
The sub-division of land, the layout of streets and the essential relationship of public and private worlds is determined by the dimensional repetition of the semi-d. In between are interspersed the basic infrastructures for survival – the petrol station, the newsagent, the amorphous green space. Such rare interruptions in function are equally a break in the dominant spatial order of the three-bedroom plot. These gaps in the dominant residential programme present an opportunity.
Distanced from the centres and avoiding the pressures of commerce, the former use value of the old city has emigrated with the citizenry to the suburbs. Despite this there remains a missing component to suburban life – the civic space. In the oversized or oddly shaped green spaces are the greatest opportunities for the civic in urban life. Free of fences, closing hours, by-laws or even function these afterthoughts may be the contemporary commons.
For a successful civic space to take root in suburbia, one cannot resort to the simple insertion of urban or rural typologies. Within the confines of the suburban daily routine there is space for an architecture. The answer lies within the rhythms of commuting, school terms and the occasional birthday party. Equally, it is essential to acknowledge the unique size and shape of the green patch in juxtaposition to the constraints of the housing plot. This break from residential form and function allows for a public scale of intervention. In other words , the possibility to give inhabitants the spaces for living that their private homes could never fulfil. Within these limits there is an opportunity, not to force a change in people’s lives but to make sublime how we already live.