Mar atá: nádúr mar chomhthéacs; The existing condition: nature as context

The reality of climate change, today, has conferred an unprecedented importance upon nature, weather and the atmosphere. Climate change is very real, perhaps not as apocalyptic as some have predicted, but nonetheless major changes are in progress. Nature has acquired a new fragility; hence architecture demands a new sensitivity. Our understanding of context is changing to include and participate in nature. How might architecture meet this existing situation? The argument for context, for redefining the architectural object as a constituent of a milieu, means rethinking the building’s engagement with its material and spatial surroundings, whether built or unbuilt. Buildings are always built somewhere. In the best cases, an architectural intervention has a critical relationship with its situation, and its construction is somehow communicative with the existing physical and social context. The thesis project is based in Connemara, in the west of Ireland. Iorras Aithneach (stormy peninsula), specifically the coastline from Cill Chiaráin (Kilkerrin/ St. Ciarán’s church) in the East to Carna (Carna/cairns or heaps) in the West, becomes the focus of the project. The coastline is broken up by sea inlets and many offshore islands. The sheer complexity, the high fractal dimensionality, of the coastline provides habitat for huge tonnages of seaweed to occur naturally. Past generations of Connemara people used to gather seaweed to fertilize their potato-crops, and to burn for kelp, which was the principal source of income for almost two-and-a-half centuries from the 1700s on. Each household of the coastal villages had seaweed rights on a certain stretch of shore, and harvested several tons of seaweed off it every year. Every little cranny of the shore was intimately known, by touch, to the families who worked it. The existing seaweed infrastructure, Arramara Teoranta (located at Céibh Cill Chiaráin) and NUI Galway Ryan Institute’s Marine Research Laboratory (located at Céibh an Chrompáin, Carna), suggests an opportunity to test the potential of seaweed farming, which might become an important local industry. What architectural principles could find value in such a context? Beyond the obvious impact of legibility, a level of simplicity is crucial, combined with a new, in depth, sensitivity in architecture. Perhaps nothing may truly be regarded as simple in itself, but, rather, must achieve simplicity as a perfectly realised part of a whole. The construction strives for a more subliminal, even primitive communication. Most immediately evident may be a concern for the grounding of the construction in its circumstance. The changeability and irregularity of the existing topography is registered and respected. The impact on the ground is minimal. The project provides an opportunity to demonstrate how architecture might meet nature’s fragility. A desire to ‘register’ the project in its context – to make spaces that in some way express the environment and respond to it – becomes important.