Spirit of Place

Abstract

This thesis explores the potential of the production space in the countryside as an architecture of economic activity and logic, and as an architecture of social encounters. The project proposes a mid-sized distillery that downsizes and deconstructs, and where the production of whiskey is broken down into seven stages and spaces. The distancing, of one stage of production from the next, simultaneously acts to maintain flexibility in the number of participating landowners, and the size of production. It creates moments of serendipitous encounter between the visitors, the commuting workers and the locals where it crosses the fields, the paths and the roads, and forms spaces of seating or shared facility for distillery by-products. The central space of the distillery navigates between the realms of production and domesticity. Different stage of production, requiring distinct temperatures, materials and tools, create unique experiences in the encounters. The possibility of the new distillery working as a co-operative consolidation of parts, and the potential to form a wider local, and regional network of shared logistics and flow of people in macro scale, present a different form of development for the Irish countryside as opposed to the mono-centric development of the east of Ireland. Rethinking the architecture of production in countryside opens an array of possibilities. Distillery, while acting as an economic anchor to re-establish the connection to the place in the dying countryside, also hold the potential to become a physical, social platform of exchange between people of different backgrounds. Architecture consolidates the countryside sparsity and provides spaces for the encounters of the people. This is not blindsiding the economic logics of the production, since this very nature of fostering meaningful interaction impart to the value of the final product, as displayed by the effort put in by existing distilleries to bring visitors to experience the process in person. In post-capitalism society of today, architecture of production holds a new spectrum of functions to explore as means of extreme efficiency to mobilizer of people.