Rural Dwelling / Living City II

Teaching Staff
Rory Caithness, Teaching Fellow, Studio Lead
Roisin Hyde, Teaching Fellow

Our SuperStudio considers housing in both rural and urban contexts within Northern Ireland exploring issues such as depopulation in rural towns and villages and the lack of quality family and community orientated housing in our cities. In this the second year of the studio in the first semester we considered Dispersed Rural Communities and how we might make proposals for ‘Clachan style’ clusters of dwellings. In the second semester we again shifted our focus towards the city, considering the rural / urban peripheral edges where the city meets the countryside, exploring sites on the edges of Belfast and Lisburn.

A key driver of the studio is the consideration of scale – exploring the context we are working in on the scale of the country (Northern Ireland) through drawings of the landscape, the scale of the city through figure / ground drawings and the immediate scale of a room through the making of 1:20 physical study models. The basic structure of the studio itself sees each semester culminate in design projects which shift in scale as we move from rural to urban. Through these drawings and models, we develop our student’s abilities to shift fluidly back and forward between these scales, the city and the room.  

Our critical precedent study in the first half of this year was the Clachan cluster, in particular those built up until the mid-19th Century in Ireland. Desmond McCourt’s Mapping of Clachans in Ireland c1840 is a key reference point evidencing the predominance of this typology at the time. These traditional Clachan clusters have gradually disappeared during the course of the 20th Century. Through an in depth study our students explored the Clachan as a typology - controlled scale, intimacy, material consistency across all buildings, consistency of form and massing and each individual building having a sense of being part of a collective whole. As we again shifted from the rural to urban (or sub-urban) context halfway through the year this study of shared communal spaces from our Clachan precedent influenced our discussions on the public realm within housing proposals on a bigger scale.