My thesis is investigating how awareness of self and of the environment can be heightened through the experience of architecture. I examine how space can be moulded in a way that encourages active experience of space, and positively affects the human body and psyche. I examine how a relationship between architecture and nature can be beneficial to both humans and to the environment.
My building proposal is located at the river edge in Limerick city centre, on Arthur’s Quay Park. The site is currently underused, and the University of Limerick intends to develop it into a university campus. I saw an opportunity to develop an architecture with which students and locals in the city centre can be properly engaged, in body and mind. The building I am proposing on the site is a school of art, architecture and making. Through the tools of light, material and structure, the proposal will encourage users to experience space in an active and mindful way that is inspired by nature.
This study aimed to develop an approach to design within the isolated landscapes of the Mayo, Ireland. To question how to resolve the man made object and isolated landscape. To investigate the problems of reconciliation a conflict must be created. Namely countering this extreme form of nature with the pinnacle of culture and the manmade, the city. A greater understanding of both was required, research focused on the landscape and the various methods of reading and interpreting it, along with a study of the city and its fundamental elements. This resulted in an extremely disparate scale of landscape and object. This is reconciled via a perceptual trick. An urban scenario is constructed of the formal reductions analysed in the study of the city, these obscure the landscape to construct an urban scene, in turn creating a formal reduction of the landscape itself. The function of each is forced to perform formally as both a haphazard simple volume in the landscape and in the urban scenario which had been posed. Through treading this line it seeks to unify both.
