How do you archive a landscape? The story of Rathlin Island told through three characters: The Maker, The Cartographer and The Performer; evolves into three sensitive architectural programmes focused on the islands’ ecology. Telling their story through an intimate series of drawings, this project explores the hidden repositories of Irish Islands. Rathlin Island is made up of a wealth of fragments woven into its landscape and history. Three characters, celebrating island craft, cartography and performance, form three sensitive architectural programmes, scattered amongst the landscape like upturned timber boats, wrecked from the sea. The buildings act as an Island Archive, looking both to the past and the future, opening up new interpretations and possibilities that discuss the need to document landscapes through memory, making and cartography whilst highlighting the fragility of nature. The thesis enriches the journey to the South of Rathlin, encouraging reflection and appreciation for our delicate ecologies and island landscapes.
Project Tag: Archive
Evidence of Time
Gallery and Library at Shirley Demesne, Carrickmacross
The project was based around a brief to merge the Shirley book collection, half of which remains in Shirley’s Castle and half of which sits in the National Library of Ireland.
The proposed building sits in a more public area of the original demesne, to allow the historical collection to be more accessible and help open up the site’s history to the public.
The design, plan, and form deals directly with themes of time, weathering, and history. It seeks to isolate the visitor in an area where their sense of time is challenged and distorted, so they feel a greater attachment to the history and story of the place.
The plan of the building intentionally creates a sense of strong arrival and confuses the visitor so they lose their sense of the time of day and where they are located. The building is intentionally buried deep in the woods, where the entrance is at the end of a long winding path through the forest.
Finally, the building is purposefully detailed in a way to increase the weathering of the building/facade, again distorting the visitor’s sense of the age of the building and place.
The project is heavily influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions.