Location:
Date:
The Pumphouse, Dublin Port
March 2024
The project was activated by an invitation by University College Dublin and Dublin Port Company to carry out a site-specific research project based at the pump-house building within Dublin Port - a space offering residencies and opportunities for cultural and public events. A large, mostly empty, post-industrial space left over from the remnants of a filled-in graving dock, the site and its associated pump-house building became a testing ground; for methods of community construction, public space interventions, parasitic and guerrilla architectures.
We led a intensive workshop on the site with architecture students from UCD. The principle of the workshop was based around designing and building interventions from a collection of borrowed, rented, and waste materials gathered from sites around the city including recycling centres, construction schools, salvage yards, building sites. They were bound together with removable and demountable connecting elements, such as ratchet straps etc.
A closing event drove the direction of the design– considering how visitors might engage with the objects, where to gather, to dance, to sit and talk, where a dj could stand. With the constraints of the amount and size of existing materials, the challenge became unifying disparate constructs into one proposal for occupying the site, with the understanding that everything would be taken away shortly after, leaving no trace.
The aberration of a proposal presented itself, the result of an experimental process of making, discussing, drawing, revising, dismantling, and making again. The immeasurable quality of the old graving dock was briefly given definition.
Dublin is a city where (for certain people and certain uses) space is limited, and often inflexible, especially cultural spaces for young people. This workshop acted as an opportunity to think about our public spaces outside the confines of Dublin’s frequently slow, permission restricted construction processes.
Copyright - Rubble 2024