ARCT30010 Architectural Design V

Academic Year 2022/2023

Module Description
This module is a response to the development of the Resilient Design Curriculum across the first three years of the undergraduate programme.

This is an inter university project and will be undertaken in conjunction with 3rd year students of Architecture at the University of Limerick. Our shared programme seeks to develop a robust and questioning design studio culture that can provide coherent responses to some of the challenges posed by human induced climate change. The project is located on Clare Island which lies at the entrance to Clew Bay in County Mayo, some 5km from the west coast of the Irish mainland. We will take as our starting point the Clare Island Survey of 1909-11, the first biological survey of a specific area in the world and remains the most ambitious natural history project embarked on in Ireland. A New Survey of Clare Island was completed between 1992-2019 and covers even more areas of interest - Birds, Soil & Soil Associations, Plants & Fungi, Freshwater and Terrestrial Algae, Archaeology, Abbey, Marine Intertidal Ecology, Geology and finally History and Cultural Landscape and is published by the Royal Irish Academy. This unique multidisciplinary project, provides us with an invaluable body of research and documented evidence and helps to inform the future conservation of natural and built heritage across Ireland and Europe.

Brief: Co-operative Housing + Land Management
The main activities on the island are farming, fishing and sustainable tourism. The project will focus on exploring the idea of co-operative housing, through the provision of approximately 10 houses, in the context of re-introducing a Rundale type agri-environmental land management system to the island. Co-operative housing is not about individual ownership but rather shared responsibility for housing provision coupled with the collective distribution and stewardship of the land and available resources; in our case focusing on the re-introduction of sustainable farming and fishing practices that maintain the islands unique and rich biodiversity.

Each student is responsible for designing a single dwelling.; however you will also be part of a larger grouping and encouraged to cultivate a common, site specific ethos and design within those parameters. You must develop an attitude of no or low waste and consider building construction in the context of needing to work closely with the landscape and the resources to hand (this includes human resources). We will aim to avoid leaning on precedent alone in favour of observing and documenting closely the island, its construction over time and its existing built fabric and man-made structures / interventions. Both house and settlement will be designed in tandem and related supporting research tasks will be introduced in parallel.

The dichotomy at the centre of the project is the relationship between individual endeavour, expression and organisation and a more collective approach to settlement, social enterprise, and work. This can be evidenced in the physical arrangement of the island landscape as we find it today where the land organisation synonymous with the co-operative Rundale system has been almost entirely supplanted by individual land holdings set up under the auspices of the Congested District Board in the late 19th century after economic collapse induced by periods of famine. Your project can be viewed through the prism of this prior comprehensive re-modelling of the island’s settlement pattern undertaken by the CDB that included the provision of new commonage, boundary divisions, houses and roads.


Structure
Student activities are studio based and attendance in studio is mandatory. Working individually, in assigned groups and together as a collective, you will carry out a combination of project development and research. The project will involve a 12-week period that shifts on a weekly basis between research and design, the individual and the collective .

Submission
At the end of the module each student is required to submit an individual, collated and organized physical portfolio of work. The portfolio must include all drawings, photographs of models, sketches and sketchbooks that demonstrate the required outcomes. In addition, each student should produce a collated digital guide document that succinctly describes and reflects on the work the student has made over the trimester with reference to the work of their peers. This document should be formatted at A3 size.