Advanced Design Studio - Farrell/McNamara

Project Theme;

We will be investigating the idea of redundancy and excess in our culture.
Why is the ordinary undervalued in favour of the novel. Why are new interventions built on the premise that complexity replaces richness.

Our theme will be the search for the latent potential of a place or set of conditions, and, with a precision of thought and economy of means to make minimum interventions to maximum effect.
Imagined worlds will be explored in terms of narrative, unexpected adjacencies of use, users, and activities in an attempt to promote the role of the architect in the making of public space from ordinary things.

Project Location;

We have chosen a half mile length of Dublin coastline which stretches from the Joyce Tower to the West pier of Dunlaoghaire Harbour.

The Martello Tower is known as the Joyce Tower since it is the setting for the opening scene of Ulysses. From Dunlaoghaire Harbour thousands of tourists depart and in the past these were not Tourists but Irish emmigrants.

In the stretch between, is a half mile of what was once a thriving public bathing place, now redundant and abandoned.

This boundary between town and sea formed a grand ‘amphitheatre’ which overlooks the sea. Laden with a myriad of rich memories and associations this place is poised to be re-created and transformed. This transformation needs to be imaginatively and strategically conceived in terms of developing viable alternative approaches to making new pieces of urban, social and physical infrastructures.

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

Project working; Tools of the trade

We will be using the group and collaborative work as a research and design tool.

Physical, large and small scale models, working concurrently from the scale of the inch to the mile will be used to work in reverse from the physical to the abstract.

Fragments of Joyce’s Ulysses will be chosen, by the students, to feed their imaginative quest.
In the weeks before coming to Dublin each student will be imagining, and proposing in advance, readings of the place, transformative strategies, concept models.

The trip to Dublin will be organized as a testing laboratory, where new pieces of work will be produced in organized workshops. Students will be exploring the real place in the context of the imagined and a process of re-evaluation will take place.

We will be enjoying the input of creative and intellectual colleagues, engineering and fabrication experts in Dublin, who will lead seminars and workshops.

The student schedule and work sequence is organized so that in-depth physical and intellectual investigation takes place in parallel, with a strong emphasis on the production of physical models and artefacts as a means of testing and refining work.