IRELAND 2005

The rural south of the republic of Ireland reflects at a glance the stereotypical image of the gently, undulated, green fields interspersed by stone walls that dominates the commonsense about the Irish landscape. In Tipperary County, Scalaheen, next to Cork, we brought forward a plan to develop a housing complex that, like others, would occupy part of this rural landscape, now in disuse.

The project strategy was based on the understanding of how the agricultural activity structured, for several centuries, the Irish landscape, to the point of becoming the common image that we now know. The need to cultivate led to the removal of the stones, used to build walls that bound the property and simultaneously provide shelter from the permanent wind, defining a geometric array over the undulating topography. Land use, now for reasons of housing could be based on the same array, bounding portions of neighbourhoods, in which the buildings would be attached to the stone walls, freeing large green meadows between the alignments of the buildings and walls. The stone wall would define the access facade to the buildings, organized on the opposite facade, opened to the landscape. The white surfaces of the buildings would draw the boundary between field and the construction, and other green surfaces, of shrub fences, would define tenuous limits, but sufficient for the sense of privacy.