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 overdevelopment. This thesis investigates the value of the neglected ghost estates. Their typical layout and structure, the way they occupy the landscape, the materials and their age define the new role and character they will inherit. The intention was to convert the derelict Ghost Estates into vital machines for communality. Architecture by its use, adapts to the users, and as it belongs and originates to the society, therefore should evolve corresponding to future needs. The chosen example is a cluster of 10 unfinished structures, that lie close to the twin towns of Ballybofey and Stranorlar and to the forthcoming Atlantic Corridor. Their position leads to the creation of a new subcenter, proposing a new landscape and a more densified future to this area. The proposed function is the one of the Market, a use and a public space that dates back in Irish history, evaluating the former way cities were structured and operate. Assuming that a ruin exists “between the not-yet and the no-longer”, the appropriation of the ghost estates breaks this condition, creating a new future, a function and an architectural language that has to correspond, to interfere and evolve the existing reality.

The Irish border, runs for 499 km separating the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland. Since its implementation in 1912, the border fluctuated in its permeability and meaning, for there it witnessed great periods of instability, quietness, denial and insignificance. When the “Good Friday agreement was signed” the common ground of the EU helped blur the choice between a united island of Ireland and a united kingdom. Today, the Irish border, is just another Irish landscape that is only relevant because of its location, and that seamless transition, is once again to be debated in the aftermath of Brexit.
Given the glacial pace of the Brexit negotiations, the issue of the Irish border might not be resolved by 2020, in fact it might not be resolved by 2040.
Borders are never resolved, they change…
Hence, instead of designing a border, the project designs borders. In this moment of uncertainty, what is/are the future(s) of the Irish border? Like all borders, the Irish border was designed, drawn like a sharp line on the map, splitting the spaces hindering its precise cut through the territory. But how come we don’t design borders in relation to what is actually happening on the ground? Can we think of the borderwall as a device? An infrastructure? A place? A passage? A landscape? A home?
The focus on a specific aspect each time, and the resulting exaggerated visions, guides the discourse into an intended direction. From trade, to issues of identity, memory, war and immigration, the border wall is designed through different lenses.
In this uniquely contested site in Ireland, this speculation not only raises questions about the design and presence of the borders themselves, but also provide a framework in which to investigate pressing matters for architects: issues of politics, agency, compliance, resistance, longevity, materiality and symbolism.
In the spirit of Perec and Queneau, the project is a collection of different borders: infrastructural, public, domestic, hard, soft, optimistic, pessimistic, past, present and future.

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.