Ireland archivos - Global Spaces

Hollybrook Road

Jordi Costa — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 07:15:44 +0000

Architects: TOB architect Photography: Aisling McCoy Construction Period: 2020 Location: Dublin, Ireland

Hollybrook Road is in a suburb of Dublin. The project involved refurbishing the ground floor return of a Victorian house and making an extension that would incorporate a kitchen and dining area for a young family that would reflect their life and their aspiration toward making something beautiful.

The project from the outset had a clear intent to make a series of distinct sequential interior spaces from the front door to the rear garden that knitted the old and new parts of the house together. The pantry area drops from the main house in 6 generous limestone steps . This room containing a hidden WC and utility area beneath the existing return and the new extension are built in reinforced concrete and wrapped in external insulation.

The concrete work forms the basis of the project providing a material that can be rough in places, smooth and more refined in others, and allows a degree of form making / shaping. Casting the extension as a singular form, the down-stand beams that hold the return overhead and the roof of the extension could depart from being mere structure. They are brought back within the main cruciform space of the extension to buffer the threshold between inside and outside. Wrapping the building in external insulation allows the concrete form to be unbroken internally. The making of the interior spaces took precedence over what the building might look like as an object externally.

The extension is pulled back from the neighbouring walls on both sides, on the kitchen sides this has the enjoyable effect of setting a window to look at a plastered wall ( the wall of the neighbours extension) as the sunlight moves across its face over the course of the day.
The external glazing screens are similarly kept outside the concrete shell and allowed run to the height of the parapet with the excessive concrete beams exposed behind bronze tinted glass. A generous relationship with the sun throughout the days and seasons is intended, manifest in the changing light and shadows cast on the sloping beams, concrete walls and speckled terrazzo floor inside.

The concrete soffit of the ceiling is carefully set out with the joint lines indicating the plans geometry. A cast fireplace forms one corner and is in contrast to the bracketed columns of the other three corners. This also slopes outward and upward and the face of the concrete is treated differently to the other board marked elements below the 2.4m datum. Its chimney overhead disobeys the orthogonal set out to the plan and rotates 45 degrees. It is capped in concrete with a hole punched through, and is intended as a new eccentric figure amongst the tall victorian brick chimneys that surround it.

I feel like the effect of the interior is akin to being a child under a very robust table. It feels strange but also protective. Its uncanny character is intended to offer respite from the world of work and toil. Celtic folklore is characterised by a tension between fantasy and reality. I hope that tension is somehow also present in this space.*

(*)‘The Celtic mind was neither discursive nor systematic…. The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulated the inner friendship which embraces nature, divinity, underworld and human world as one.’ (Anam Cara, 1997, John O’Donohue)

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Hollybrook Road se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The Writing Room

Jordi Costa — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 19:42:10 +0000

Architects: Clancy Moore Photography: Fionn McCann Construction Period: 2022 Location: Dublin, Ireland

This project arose in lockdown, to make a space for a novelist to write in isolation in their garden. The site, behind an existing terrace of houses, was inaccessible to builders, so we designed the room to be constructed off-site and craned into position.

This contingency governed the design and it became an exercise in éspace minimum – its weight had to work with the capacity of the crane. The weight limit also allowed us to dispense with conventional foundations in favour of augured ground anchors. The shape, too, was informed by the offsite approach. The room’s structure is an exoskeleton with raised corners linked to lifting eyes. Within, we found space for a rich internal world, lined in red-stained beech and mirror. It provides a desk to work from, and a daybed for rest.

Placed in a corner of the garden, the room seeks to capture a series of spaces between itself and the surrounding planting. Recognising that repose is as important as production, the room reaches beyond the site also, providing a periscoped distant view to the sea from the daybed via its mirrored ceiling.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada The Writing Room se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

Medieval Mile Museum

Jordi Costa — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 12:11:30 +0000

Architects: Mccullough Mulvin Architects Photography: Christian Richters Construction Period: 2017 Location: Kilkenny, Ireland

St Mary’s Hall, formerly St Mary’s Church, High Street, Kilkenny was founded in the thirteenth century as the parish church of the City. In use as a Parish and Masonic Hall since the mid-20th century, it was purchased by Kilkenny Borough Council in 2010 with assistance from Kilkenny County Council and the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

The building is a cruciform 13th century stone structure with a later tower at its Western end; it sits in a substantial walled graveyard to the rear of High Street. The graveyard has recently been opened as a garden to the public; it contains many important tombs and monuments from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

The church had acquired depth and complexity in monuments and nave aisles, elements which were later shorn off, the aisles removed, the chancel demolished- a shape expanding and contracting, already through a violent cycle of change. As found, the interior was cut up into separate rooms and levels to make a parish hall.

The project intention was to restore the church as a museum, retaining some of the 20th century interventions, and to honour its medieval spatial complexity by re-constructing the North aisle and chancel to the original plan but a different internal section and materiality using the base of the original walls in an non-interventive way. The chancel room overlooks the town, re-establishing its dominant form in the urban landscape; the space beneath it becomes a tomb-filled undercroft. Both of the new gabled elements are finished in lead, with rooflights directed to levels of archaeology below.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Medieval Mile Museum se publicó primero en Global Spaces.