The project is part of a territorial strategy focused on the transformation of masterpieces of Irish industrial archaeology. This research intends to take advantage of the geographical, landscape, and climatic characteristics by considering the many ruined mining constructions that mark out the territory, as new project situations that can accommodate the new programmatic needs of the municipality and the county.
Now abandoned, these «machine-buildings» appear on the territory as the ghosts of an industrial past with a silhouette as elegant as it is singular. Carried by a strong imagination linked to the underside of our anthropized
soils, like a “Journey to the Center of the Earth”(JULES VERNE) and echoing the programmatic past of these buildings, the project puts nature and artefacts in tension in a desire to make livable a natural place and considers that all the symbiosis and harmony of the intervention rests on the ability of the building to coexist with its natural environment in which it is located.
The project provides for a part in rehabilitation and another in extension, in the continuity of the first, lying in the rocks which surround the old mine.
The intention to embed the project in the rocky mass of the mountain gives the building a discreet insertion in an intense relationship between the distant landscape and the nearby landscape, between architecture and nature.
Indeed, both immersed in the ground and emerging on the surface like old mining constructions, the project reveals the history of this place in a mysterious atmosphere that humans have already confronted. It immerses us in darkness, clarity, matter, water, air, fire, silence, landscape, horizon.
