ARCT30010

Module Description:
AN EQUILIBRIUM OF WATER

Location:
Graiguenamanagh / Tinnahinch

Background:
The year is focused on the town of Graiguenamanagh / Tinnahinch on the Kilkenny, Carlow border (population 1500) and is centred around the theme of water. The town has grown up around the confluence of the Duiske and Barrow River and the students are asked to examine how water, in all of its various manifestations, has been a critical agent in the settlement’s formation across several centuries and remains an essential component of its future. The town’s rivers have contributed positively to its economic development: they’ve powered mills; provided transport and communication to the outside world; clean water; fishing opportunities and more lately provided the infrastructure for water based leisure activities such as rowing and kayaking, but they also bring extensive flooding, which exacerbates urban decline, abandonment and building decay. Currently, a major flood defence scheme is proposed for the town, while paradoxically limits on the town’s water supply have resulted in restrictions on new development.

This semester the students are tasked with establishing a new equilibrium of water, demonstrating through their work a more balanced appreciation of the potential for the critical resource of water to reshape and positively influence the urban environment.

In 1204 Cistercian monks from Stanley Abbey in Wiltshire, England founded a monastery at the meeting of the Duiske (black water) and Barrow River. The monks developed a substantial woollen industry that conducted trade across Europe. Located where Cushendale carries on the tradition of yarn spinning and textile production today the Cistercian mill necessitated the construction of a mill race that extends north-west from the town into the townland of Priestsvalley, drawing on water from multiple streams that filter through the watershed between Mount Brandon and Coppenagh. At its intersection with the Duiske River is the modern water works that provides the town with its supply of potable water.

Programme:
Experiments on Water

Semester 01 is made up of a survey period of five weeks consolidated with a small design project. This includes a detailed survey of the mill race in week 2. The proposed project is set alongside the Cushendale Mill complex. Part of the complex includes an abandoned corn mill, which the owners are currently in the early stages of renovating as a visitor centre and will include the restoration of the mill wheel at the head of the mill race. Drawing on their survey of water, the students are asked to design a structure / enclosure / landscape that embodies and makes manifest in both its concept, form and construction the complex interdependency between water and settlement.

Structure:
Student activities are generally studio based and attendance in studio is mandatory. Working individually and in assigned groups you will carry out a combination of fieldwork, research, model building, drawing and design work over a period of 12-weeks. The programme has 2no. connected stages of development leading to one coherent proposal. Week 2 will include a short field trip to Graiguenamanagh.

Submission:
At the end of the module each student is required to submit an individual, collated A1 physical portfolio of work and a series of physical models. The portfolio must include all drawings, photographs of models, rough-work and sketchbooks that demonstrate the required outcomes. In addition, each student should produce a digital A3 reflection document (format pdf) that succinctly describes and reflects on the work the student has made over the trimester. This document should also be printed at A3 size.