(Re)Identify

My thesis intent is to provide new ways of seeing and understanding Limerick City. New perspectives that may encourage and promote a fresh approach to our attitude regarding the built environment around us. The main site I have chosen is a disused garage on the Dock Road, the old industrial heart of the city.. With the declining fate of the docks, many of the iconic buildings in the area have fallen into disrepair, and some have disappeared completely. My site is characterised by having a fragment of an 18th Century Granary wall as one of the bounding features of a now unused mechanics garage. It is surrounded on three sides by 1990’s industrial warhouses, and the fourth side is bounded by a national route, the N69, a main artery in and out of the city. Across the road, the site is faced with listed, newly re-roofed 5 storey 19th Century Granary building, the successer to the Granary that left the fragment of wall on the site. While the main site for the project is situated in this place, it stretches across the city in another less imposing and more intuitive way. The setting up of a route that traverses the built landscape is important to the project, moving from Industrial Dockland, through the Georgian Core and ending at the largest intact section of Medieval City Wall. The route is punctuated with light infrastructural keys or totems that allow a continuity of experience, and enable the person to be led along a path across the city that is unusual and rarely seen as a whole experience. Through this method it is intended to look at Limerick’s built heritage in a way that few experience at the moment, and to walk from the past into the present and back again.