The Architecture of

MeasureTutors: Tiago Faria, Stephen Mulhall

Alexander Crean 05423040

The charge to build, to create place, is to at once enter into a dialogue between particularity and possibility, to situate us in the continuity of our shared time line between the honesty of the past and the promise of the future. A building must strive to engender a sense of time and place, to reveal in its crafting the identity of its people.

We exist in a world where the proliferation of technologies have emancipated us and indeed architecture from a sense of ‘genius loci’. The idea of place and our sense of community has increasingly become something far more notional, removed from the physicality of location. And although without hesitation society has embraced the freedom and exuberance of this dissemination of different cultures, and the wealth of benefits it brings, there remains an inherent need within us to retain a sense of identity, both personal and cultural, of belonging to a place. And it is in architecture that this identity can find for itself a physicality once more, providing a manifest link between the head and the hand, a craft and its culture.

There is a reciprocal connection between making and thought, all cultures have sculpted and concreted their identity through the act of creating. A cities vibrance is felt when its creative endeavors are made palpable and their process and experience brought to bear on the urban fabric, made visible in the city. There is an essential affirming nature to the act of making and finding meaning within its process, irrespective of the cause, the transformation of materials is a proclamation of culture and a root through our history.

‘ Reading the vernacular is one of the ways of measuring a culture. It necessitates a reading of the past as a means of discovering what we may retain for the future’. - (Peter Salter 2000)

And it is through the translation of these readings that architecture can forge for itself an honesty and a relevance in an ever changing progressive world. Neither in the trappings of nostalgia nor the blanketing of modernity but, evoking through the truth of its materials, the sensitivity of its scale and details the echoes of its past, marks of its context, and the signs to its future.

This is what I have found within the process of architecture, its ability to illuminate perhaps even revive what is latent but often forgotten in the culture that wraps it i wish to explore how its articulation and the cultural forces that drive its craft allow us to trace this line, through past and future, self and culture, site and habitation. How in a modern society we can retain and foster the sense of grounding, belonging and cultural identity whilst still inspiring and contributing something new.

Architecture and Identity

Thesis Statement 19/09/2010

Inami WoodCarving Museum - P Salter Flower Kiosk, Malmo Cemetery - S. Lewerentz

My early research, sparked by my initial written statement was an exploration of that particularly evocative term ‘craft’. It is one which I have always been drawn to, allowing an articulation of certain qualities that otherwise seem to escape definition. And yet my readiness to use the word was seemingly uninhibited by my lack of ability to define it. I realised that I had been indulging in a severe misappropriation. Engaging a sort of ‘faux nostalgia’, using the term and its associated language for its romantic and idealistic associations, their suggestion of a sense of quality and tradition which in a modern environment we find ourselves increasingly divorced from.

And yet culturally we retain a palpable fascination with particular objects which we consider to be ‘crafted’, we uphold the value and integrity of the ‘hand made’. So high is our esteem for such practices that the word ‘craftsmanship’ has become synonymous with quality, care and precision, at times even approaching moral virtues of purity and honesty. So how can it be that such objects and indeed such practices are now the exception as apposed to the rule? That those endeavours and their product which we so revere have been steadily curtailed and marginalised. Has the relentless drive of modernity striped us of one of our most important expressions of cultural identity? How can a society which is obsessed with the material, the object have only the slightest semblance of understanding of what it is to make something? If the process of ‘making’ is the symbiotic relationship of the mind and the body of which Pallasmaa spoke of in ‘The Thinking Hand’ then what becomes of a society which severs such a link. Where the idea of ‘craft’ becomes an ideal we often refer to but seldom experience.

And so I set about analysing this notion of ‘craft’ figuratively and literally ‘taking it to pieces’. Attempting to find for myself within it, some integral principles which could be reinterpreted through architecture, folding those forgotten values for which the word stands back into a modern context.

A Question of Craft

Dissection Drawing Scale 1 . 1

Dissection Drawing Scale 1 . 1

Gradually from my research two fundamental principles emerged which I found to underlie even the more diverse interpretations of the term ‘craft’. And it was these ideals which I later sought to embody in the approach and design of my architectural project.

The first is the understanding of the functional. A craft object is defined by its fulfilment of a functional requirement, the common trait of being designed for human interaction. As a result our understanding of these objects is predicated on this interaction, we do not simply see ‘crafted’ objects we experience them in an enactive way. As such our tactile compulsion to touch, hold and ultimately use such objects is integral to our comprehension of them. Traditionally all functional objects were in essence ‘crafted’ or ‘hand made’ yet with the advent of the industrial revolution and mass production, this has become almost exclusively the exception. This progression has led craft practices to increasingly produce more and more specialised and unique pieces approaching a quality akin to the that of sculpture or art and yet here too craft finds itself in a compromised position. Having never been held in the same regard as artistic endeavours, due to the prevailing consensus that the practical nature of craft lacks the intellectual weight of artistry. And so craft finds itself occupying the precarious territory between the realms of design and art.

It is for this reason that the idea of the traditional craft centre or museum is something quite perverse, by exhibiting hand made functional objects like pieces of art or sculpture, they become divorced from their central purpose and resonance. As a result they fail to communicate as either art or design pieces becoming merely relics of a disappearing past. This idea of function is also present in the act of making. Craft objects themselves are the direct function of specific processes. As such it is essential that the process as much as the product itself is made tangible. A craftsman is not an artist working in a reclusive studio, but one providing a product and a service for a community as such it is integral that they form a visible and engaged part of that community.

And so at its essence craft is dynamic and enactive, both in its making and its experience. A trait it shares with architecture itself. And this provides an opportunity for intervention. For although we cannot drastically increase the scale at which hand crafts are currently operating, we can through architecture significantly change the way in which we engage with them.

An Active Craft

Enactive Response Intrinsic Response

The second principle which surfaced during my studies was the particular link between a craft and its community. A study of the area of Weavers Square examined the process through which the Dutch Huguenots arrived in Dublin, establishing a thriving textile industry and building their own homes in which they both lived and worked. The architecture and the social community were delineated by the act of making which bound the people to both each other and place. Soon industrial process took the endeavours of such small scale ‘cottage industries’ to the larger scale of the factory floor and machine operated mass production. And although one could argue that the ideals of ‘craft’ in terms of the act of making departed at this point, the link between making and community remained intact. With the establishment of factories and accompanying workers housing, entire communities were founded on this common act of making.With yet further modernisation and the collapse of many traditional industrial processes, these same factories lay abandoned for some years after the fall of industrial era. Until recently, when their premises were reappropriated by groups of artists and crafts people, who once again found the compulsion to operate as a community. Re inhabiting these industrial shells in the very same vein that led the first Huguenot weavers in Dublin. Parallel to this craft as established previously is bound at its essence to the community for which it produces, a craft product is subject in no less significant a way than one which is mass produced to the rules of production and consumption. A craft must relate and respond to the community it seeks to serve.

Here again the opportunity for architectural intervention is available, providing a spatial solution which accommodates the idea of the community as it pertains to craft. Facilitating spaces which allow crafts people to work together in a creative community of making whilst simultaneously allowing a more tangible interaction between them and the wider community within which they operate.

Craft and Community

Study of Weavers Square Community

Having ascertained these underlying principles which I wished to address in my design intervention, I began searching for an appropriate area in which to work, one which would provide opportunity to test and refine an architectural design predicated on this initial research. Attempting to integrate these forgotten aspects of craft into the modern context, making them tangible once more.

Quickly my research led me to Liberties, in particular the immediate area surrounding Thomas Street. The urban fabric of the Liberties is carved by its history of making. A now somewhat derelict landscape of production and consumption, it was once the vital locus of many trades. From the small scale work of goldsmiths and tanners to large industries of brewing and textiles. The area provides an architectural compendium of the history of making in Dublin’s capital, from the cottage garrison to the factory floor. The area also reflects a similar spectrum in its consumption of goods, with the large scale supermarkets and department stores of Thomas Street standing aside the specialist shops of Francis Street and the numerous bustling market stalls of street traders along Meath Street.

Recently the area has gained new relevance with a revitalised culture of making beginning to re inhabit the remnants of this manufactured terrain. Home to the now expanding National College of Art and Design the area has begun to redefine itself as a vibrant creative centre with the development of affordable working studios and exhibition spaces. Along with this the Digital Hub project has purchased large areas of the industrial landscape to be redeveloped to house the burgeoning creative and digital industry in Ireland. This distinct landscape provided a more than suitable frame within which the ideas of the thesis could be examined.

The initial design response was developed after a survey of the area revealed a myriad of disused or derelict sites within this topography of production and consumption. These could be redeveloped within the existing urban grain providing a new creative network of making laced throughout the city. Exploiting the benefits of existing conditions and spatial arrangements. The proposal would consider the area at large but act locally taking the shape of a ground up small scale development of increments. Thus avoiding the shortcomings of programs such as the Digital Hub itself which attempted a grandiose top down initiative which ultimately proved unrealistic and ill considered.

A Landscape of Production and Consumption

Scales of Production and Consumption

Exploring the Idea of a Network of Revived Sites

Having completed the mapping of broad conditions of habitation and use in the area it became important to establish some parameters in order to narrow the research and allow a more precise cataloguing of specific conditions. This resulted in a survey of the georgian typology about which the area, Meath Street in particular now operates. The result of Dublin’s piece meal development by numerous land owners, the grain of the city exists as a series of long narrow plots occupied by traditional two bay 3 -4 storey georgian houses. In the modern environment these plots are now occupied in a similar fashion to their original design, with public and commercial areas at ground floor level and living spaces above. What emerged from this study was that this particular condition provides an unusually successful spatial arrangement. The long publicly accessed plots serving as small sequential extensions of the street, allowing a unique architecture of exchange where the divisions between external and internal selling spaces are blurred creating a vibrant arcade which operates at the scale of the city.

This georgian condition provided insight to develop a site specific response that emerged from the existing urban fabric. Forming the basis of an architectural intervention that would operate within and improve upon this condition. Allowing a program that could develop in parallel to its environment as appose to being imposed upon it.

The Architecture of Exchange

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‘ ‘The Georgian Condition’ 1847 Roque Map and Current Activity Map of Thomas and Meath Street

Study of the Windsor Arcade Plot on Meath Street

The success of the Windsor Arcade and indeed the area of Meath Street as a whole is the way in which it operates in a reciprocal relationship with the existing condition of street trading. Meath Street isparticular in that it is one of two street in Dublin (Moore Street being the other) along which street trading is not prohibited. As a result the development of a paved interior arcade in which a narrow georgian plot functions as an internalised street seems not only a natural but logical progression from existing circumstances. A sense of functional opportunism exist whereby existing formats are appropriated on a needs must basis and proceed to function with a vitality and success that would not have been considered possible. The narrow 5m span, with expanded depth of 34m providesemployment for some 15 businesses housing everything from a hairdressers to stationary shops. And yet its visual impact on the city is nil, due to the fact that it exists mereley as an extension of an existingtypological arrangement.

The study of the Windsor arcade provided both evidence and opportunity. Evidence of how the seemingly restrictive georgian plot system, can in fact enable a particularly effective spatial condition for diversity and interaction. And opportunity to develop a design response that takes this condition as its basis, and seeks to improve and elaborate on its principles.

‘

‘ Spatial Sequence of the Windsor Arcade and Tradition of Market Trading

The rhythmic plot divisions along the street front establish a distinctive threshold between the busy commercial life of the main street and the more private world of the back lanes behind. However the current extension of the street along the ground floor of the georgian houses operates more as a cul de sac than a thoroughfare. Allowing the public to cross its initial threshold only to be returned back to the street from which they entered. Never allowing a complete transition from one realm of public life to the other. This condition is accentuated in the typical georgian section which establishes notions of front and back of house, public and private.It was at this point that I began to explore one of the principle points from the initial research of the thesis. If one of the essential elements of a successful craft collective is the engagement and interaction with its surrounding community, and the particular nature of this area is the street forming the focus of both social and commercial interaction. Then what design opportunities does this present?

Could the georgian plot be developed so as to form a continuous street connection between the front streets and back lanes, connecting distinct but equally vibrant conditions of social interaction. Further to this could this street condition continue vertically through a design program, connecting the previously separated conditions of working and selling allowing craftspeople and the consumer a direct frame for engagement. Thus allowing the craft worker direct access to an already highly active market place whilst simultaneously allowing the consumer an insight to the trades being practiced. Stitching the practice of particular crafts back into the ebb and flow of a busy modern cycle.This hypothesis formed the basis of initial concept designs which were explored through models and drawings.

Developing a Design Response

‘ Early Concept Sketches

‘ Concept Model of Design Intervention

The Part and The Whole

Having established a design parti which could begin to be applied to this particular condition I returned to the broader context of the thesis to examine whether such an approach would allow the development of an overall creative network within the city.

Re examining previous survey work revealed the presence of a number of sites sharing similar conditions within the area of Thomas and Meath Street that would lend themselves to such a design approach.A collection of sites were surveyed with a number of consistent traits. All operated along the existing georgian plot system, they had prominent street frontage which was blocked either byboarding or vacant single storey structures and all had access to large areas of vacant unused space to the rear linking them to the activity of the back lanes.Once this information was gathered I began establishing a design and brief proposal which could be developed incrementally and concurrently with a wider network within the city. The underlying idea being that the gradual redevelopment of these disused sites would be driven by their use and success overtime. Producing a new creative network formed as the direct result of current conditions and stimuli.

The broad outline for the brief was conceived as a timeline. Initially the unused space would be made public, by removing the boarding or small derelict structures. This space could then operate as a street market with a simple hard infrastructure providing market spaces and vertical organisation elements. The next stage would see the development of small studio spaces, these would provide affordable working spaces for craftspeople and a direct conduit to the now established public market. With the growth of the program overtime soon larger workshop spaces would be provided which would be open for use to others not necessarily working on the site itself. This would allow the specific building program to connect with the more general conditions of surrounding creative communities. And finally larger teaching and community work spaces would be established to allow the program to re contribute to its surrounding area providing education and training in specific crafts. This would provide mutual benefit to both the community and the craft workers as well as helping the proliferation of tacit knowledge of these diminished practices.

The program would set a general standard for the development of these similar sites whilst remaining open enough in its strategy to allow for site specific fluctuations and reappropraitions. The ultimate aim being the gradual introduction and growth of a creative program that at all stages is driven by and responds to the needs of its surrounding community. Operating within its current systems and seeking the subtle re stitching of the urban fabric.

‘ The Fractured Georgian Elevation

‘ Development of a New Creative Network

‘ Strategy for Development of Program on Site

It was at this point in the design process that the principles which had been established during the initial research and the specific conditions emerging from site analysis and study began to align.

The initial aim of the thesis was to explore an architecture which would allow the ideals and practices of craft to be reintroduced to a modern society in a way that was both appropriate and functional. In order to achieve this two principles were identified, the program must be active and engaging in its nature and functioning. And it must foster and strengthen a sense of community among the individual workers and the wider local community. Now it seemed that he architectural means along which to achieve this was concurrent with the needs of the area as a whole. Providing a condition of reciprocal advantage to both individual building program and its urban environment.

The new creative centre would operate along and re-establish forgotten or underused routes through the city. These routes would finally cross the georgian threshold which had until now been explored but never fully connected. An area which uniquely finds its vibrance and expression on the street would be allowed to develop along those very lines which it finds its strength. The resultant increase in public footfall along these routes would allow the valuable reconnection of the existant community whilst simultaneously providing the energy and dynamic needed to drive the building program itself.The growth of working studios and workshop spaces would increase in relation to the underlying street market spaces. Providing income not just the craft workers themselves but also the community at large. Each activity fuelling the other, the program would be in a constant state of flux and activity.

This approach would encourage two important aspects of the thesis to develop. By placing the process and product of craft workers alongside the commercial products of the open markets, craft objects may be removed from their ‘glass case’ so to speak and placed back into their intended frame of use, as functional items. Secondly by allowing the public to view the practices of specific trades, the process of work itself may become demystified, allowing the practice of specific crafts to emerge from relative obscurity and be recast in a modern vital mind set.

Ultimately the program would seek to establish an active community of craft. Operating along current systems of interaction, allowing it a renewed relevance. The particular design approach would sit modern commercial systems alongside traditional practices of craft in a symbiotic relationship. Ensuring the program is nether irrelevantly nostalgic nor unnecessarily modern in its application. Allowing the classical ethos of craft, and the modern imperative of consumption to sit side by side and provide a basis of reciprocity. Establishing an architecture for the modern practice of craft in its truest sense.

Having established the principles, the ethos and underlying design approach in which to explore the design thesis I began testing the proposal under the specificities of a single site. To examine the fluctuations and particularities which would adjust and hopefully enrich the initial proposal.

Applying Principles

Redevelopment of Routes Through the City

Testing the Program

The specific site chosen consisted of two georgian plots along the main thoroughfare and street market of Meath Street just a few doors down from the Windsor Arcade itself. Currently consisting of two single storey shops set to close and be redeveloped into a small apartment scheme the site provided ample opportunity to be developed as a representative piece of the more general approach of regeneration.

The site sits across from the Liberty Market, (a well established trading centre for the area) and is connected to the main entrance of the NCAD through the relatively underused Molyneux Lane. The site is also home to the Vicar St stables a small cluster of simple sheds which house a number of horses and carriages. The constraints and nature of the site allowed for a refinement of the initial design proposal. Gradually a specific brief was developed which constituted 6 day studios in a front building with a small exhibition and shared workshop space entered along Meath Street, an open street market on ground floor level, linking new stable spaces grouped around a rear courtyard to the back. A larger training facility consisting of two general workshops and associated classrooms, would relate to the NCAD allowing a sharing of facilities and reinstating the route along Moneyleux Lane. The project was designed to represent a program which had become relatively established in terms of its timeline in the community in order to exemplify how all its varied elements may interact with one another over time.

The program embodies the intent of the thesis proposal and acts upon the initial research. The trading on Meath Street is extended along the ground floor of the project which is completely public and opens to the external courtyard which functions as both a market and workspace. The vertical circulation is also made public to allow the community to view the work of the individual craft workers in their studios first hand. The scheme operates along the georgian plot allowing the public to pass from Meath Street to the more private laneways behind and vice versa, allowing the boundaries between public and private to be re calibrated through activity.

The initial design models sought to achieve permeability both in plan and section, inverting the traditional georgian typology whilst still operating within its boundaries. This fluidity of circulation sought to provide the framework for interaction which would give the design its potency. Market spaces, stables, training workshops and personal studios interacting with one another along shared public pathways and open spaces. Gradually this initial site strategy was elaborated and detailed through numerous re-workings.

Initial Study Model

Site Plan and Photos

Meath Street

Molyneux Lane

Development Sketches

Development Model

Ground Floor 1 . 200

First Floor 1 . 200

Ground Floor 1 . 200

First Floor 1 . 200

Ground and First Floor Plan

Articulation

The physical expression of the building seeks to assert the underlying design ethos of the project. The hard infrastructural elements which enclose the courtyard space and control vertical circulation are described as rough surfaced, untreated walls and towers. These act as organisational pieces which delineate movement as well as connoting public or communal areas. Their material treatment is suggestive of the robust working, active nature of the activities they enclose. These functional pieces also provide all the circulation and service requirements of the various spaces, allowing the secondary more private spaces of the brief to achieve a more introvert and careful expression.

The areas of the craft studios are expressed in timber, suggestive of the careful work taking place within their walls. With the organisational cores of the project serving as the primary structure these private areas are able to operate more freely, projecting out from the main structure to take advantage of views and light. The ground surface of the external courtyard as well as the shared spaces within the buildings themselves are hard landscaped, a continuation of the existing street paving to further suggest the notion of permeability and public access. The nature of these materials and there use is to allow the buildings appearance to reflect the nature of its occupation. Modest and functional, the building speaks of the ethos of craft, the tailored response to specific needs constructed of appropriate materials. The scale of the building is in keeping with the georgian precedent maintaining the street and parapet line, whilst the rising circulation chimneys suggest the more industrial nature of the areas history, recalling the grey brick flumes of St. James Brewery or the shared fireplaces of the Huguenot Dutch Billy’s.

The articulation of the building allows an enhancement of its program, public and private areas overlap, boundaries simply suggested by material expression but avoiding gentrification by over distinction or specification. In essence the building is conceived as a series of overlapping and interconnected working spaces roughly hewn and weathered by its inhabitation. An abstracted georgian house, notions of private and public, front house and mews, individual and communal, factory and domestic, consumption and production are all broken down and rebuilt together combined within the same program, linked together in a microcosm of making.

Section through Meath St and Molyneux Lane

Concluding

The final design attempts to achieve a physical manifestation of the intents and principles established during the course of the research. It seeks to respond to the particular and the general, the practical and the theoretical. What emerged through the research and the work itself, was a gradual positioning and action in relation to the question of craft raised in its early stages.

Connotations of craft are often concerned with the particular, the idea of specific processes unchanged by time. However such a mindset tends to seclude the act of craft or making by hand to the past. The notion that if it cannot exist exactly as it once did then it cannot exist at all.What the thesis explores is that the idea that craft is much more than a single activity, that it is an infrastructure both physical and social. That it has a very real architecture around which it operates. And what has been lost over time is not just the knowledge of unique practices but more fundamentally this infrastructure of interaction which was once so integral to daily life. That the sense of nostalgia or an absence we often experience when we speak of craft relates to this much greater void in modern society.

Through various explorations and surveys of specific conditions what was revealed was that this infrastructure of engagement has in some areas been severely augmented but not removed entirely. That modernisation and commercial forces have altered the material about which particular interactions revolve but not the economical or social need for such interactions. That there remains a strong semblance of past operations.

Finally the thesis attempts two re build and integrate these two conditions. To use the strengths of one two revive the other. To rebuild the social and physical infrastructure of making within the modern parameters of consumption. To construct a new creative community predicated on the architecture of craft.

I would like to express a sincere thank you to my tutors Tiago and Stephen.

Their patience and guidance was invaluable during the often daunting, always unpredictable but ultimately rewarding process of design.

References

- ‘The Craftsman’ - Paul Sennet - Penguin Books 2009

- ‘The Craft Reader’ - Glenn Adamson - Berg 2010

- ‘A Theory of Craft’ - Howard Risatti - University North Carolina Press 2007

- ‘Craft, Perception and the Possibilities of the Body’ - Margaret A. Boden - University Northumbria Sept 1999

- ‘Industrial Ireland 1750 - 1930 An Archaelogy’ - Colin Rynne - The Colins Press 2006

- ‘Factory’ - G. Darley - Reaktion Books 2003

- ‘Technics and Civilization’ - Lewis Mumford - Lowe and Brydone 1934

- ‘The Last of the Dublin Silk Weavers’ - Kathleen Breathnach - Irish Arts Review 1990

- ‘Newmarket and Weavers Square’ - William O Frazer - dublincity.ie

-’The Thinking Hand’ - Juhani Palasmaa - John Wiley Publishers 2009

- 4 + 1 Peter Salter Building Projects - Black Dog Publishing 2004