Reclaiming constructed wilderness

My thesis entitled “Reclaiming | constructed Wilderness”, looks simultaneously at the notion of wilderness and of the construction and preservation of such; to create a better reality for our country through proposed architectural intervention. I analysed my interests in the relationship of nature and architecture ; at places constructed by man which were inevitably being reclaimed by the overpowering force of nature. I am fascinated by the edges of our architectural interventions, of the boundaries that they create within the context of their siting and how we can blur such so that we may achieve a symbiotic relationship with nature. The ecotones between habitats and biomes both those real and constructed were where my interests lie. I read a number of sources around the topic, authors including : Gilles Clement, Arundhati Roy, Rachel Carson, Ian Mc Harg, Eugene Odum and Aldo Leopold. In reading on disintegration and natural processes in biomes, I was inspired to create architecture which may pay homage to these natural occurrences all around us. I used reed beds to further cleanse water in the lake within the site and proposed to farm and feed the land so to validate living in this place. The final paper goes through my theoretical written idea and also aims to illustrate and annotate my design process. Finally it shows the drawings and architectural models which I constructed to represent my final thesis proposal and physical representation of the theoretical standing. My thesis project is about using architecture to reclaim wilderness in a place seemingly natural but that in truth is created from a number of unnatural processes, sited to the West of Limerick city within the Irish cement factory compound, my project emerges from the soil. The buildings act as a new topography on the site, one to be walked over; to allow people to experience what is there in a new way. They also act as a framework for nature and would allow for the eventual reclamation of wilderness on the site, thus giving it back to nature. The final aim being that the project acts as a critique of those places where we ordinarily wouldn’t or couldn’t live or inhabit; to site something in a place that is created from a number of unnatural processes. The result of this thesis and research I find categorically lies in ways to deal with disused industrial space and abused sites within our country. It looks at using a new method of constructing a topography of place that will heal the damage which has been done to the site on which it is located. To use architecture as a tool for nourishment of land in collaboration with that which we perceive as wilderness, that can reclaim the framework of architecture and through its disintegration create a new reality of place, one imitating metabolic processes of nature.