A Donegal Bestiary: A radical ecology for the Big Houses of Ireland

The project explores the idea of exhibiting animals both in literal terms – the zoo for instance as a space for the display and containment of animals – and as a metaphorical construct for architecture’s relationship with nature, with enclosures and with artefacts. The Bestiary is proposed as a new way of exhibiting animals and as a new program...

Finding Hy-Brasil: The Gateway Between Reality And Unreality

Through Irish history, different spiritual demands in specific historical moments impacts on the legends of Hy-Brasil. In turn, the stories of Hy-Brasil reflects the history of Ireland through its possible position, appearances, items events, viewpoints gateways and monuments. The project is to use the history of Hy-Brasil, a mystical island of...

Grand Motel: and other luxuries of a scenic Irish journey

Using the value of scenic landscape of the West coast of Ireland, the project proposes a construction of the new type of territorial tourism, called the Grand Motel. The Grand Motel explores the idea of luxury. It does so through the XIX century Grand Hotel- type and the grandeur of landscape as an authentic form of Irish luxury, synthesised...

The Seven Houses of Man: Narrating the Story of Irish Housing from the Mid-Nineteenth Century Onwards

By considering the forces and events that cause individuals and families to move from one household to the next, between the city and the country, between one country and another, this project examines housing in Ireland, seeking to understand how these events feed back into the design and provision of housing. Seven key moments are identified...

Tour of Ireland

The bicycle tour, more than any other sporting event, is fundamentally dependent on the landscape. The landscape has been used not only to challenge the peloton physically but also as a visual background for the event that has been broadcast worldwide. Tour of Ireland was first organised in 1953 as a part of An Tóstal, an Irish cultural festival...

The Farmacy: A new small scale pharmaceutical production site

This project explores the realities of production in the Irish landscape, and speculates upon certain industries that maintain both a rural economy and Ireland’s architectural identity. The essence of this project as the name suggest, is to combine two residual industries in Ireland, farming and the pharmaceutical industry into one new synthetic...

Spirit of Place: A Whiskey Distillery in the Irish Countryside

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,...

Learning from Ghost Estates: the new ruins of the Ιrish landscape

From 1993 to 2007, Ireland experienced a period of remarkable economic growth, during the so-called Celtic Tiger era, followed by a severe housing and financial crisis, leaving over 2500 unfinished estates scattered around the island. The so-called ghost estates , became the ruins of crisis, reminders and remainders of former years...

The application of an underground optical fragmentation analysis method at the Lisheen Mine

Blast fragmentation has an influence on the drill and blast designs, loading, hauling and crushing operations. Previous studies in other mines have shown that by optimizing fragmentation it is possible to save on operational costs. This thesis investigates and applies a method for measuring fragmentation in stopes with the aid of image analysis...

turning rural: Enabling sustainability in remote settlement patterns in Ireland

This thesis is about the development and testing of an approach that addresses the particular challenges of remote rural settlements, due to conflicting trends of outmigration and rural repopulation, and relates to the planning processes which affect them. Key to this approach is the optimisation of ecosystem services. This is based on the...