UCD College of Engineering & Architecture
Coláiste na hInnealtóireachta agus na hAiltireachta
WAF Commendation to UCD Architecture and Chinese University of Hong Kong
11 student teams from around the world were shortlisted and invited to take part in a 36 hr design charrette at the World Architecture Festival 2012 in Singapore. Each team was then critiqued live and winners chosen by a panel of judges led by Murray Fraser. The competition was won by the University of Ferrara with a project entitled 'In the Core of Renaissance Architecture'.
The joint UCD/Chinese University of Hong King project ‘Building Mountain’ explored options for vacant housing throughout Ireland. The project considered the failed economics and nostalgia that has characterised the past decade and proposed a controlled demolition of all under-occupied, under-used, unsafe buildings and a land swap providing accommodation on currently derelict urban sites for those who wished to leave peripheral ghost estates. A new public entity would facilitate a swap of land and material, rather than taking ownership of these sites and their debt.
Vacant housing throughout the country would be dismantled and the salvaged material loaded in trucks to be taken to the docklands and strategic brownfield sites. This would form the Building Mountain. People in remaining ghost estate housing would be offered a land swap, giving up their housing and moving to new urban density developments in the city constructed from the mountain. The Ghost estates will be returned to agriculture and nature, returning to productive use as parks, allotments or agriculture. Those who choose remain in a transformed exurban territory, the derelict houses and incomplete site works now gone. Those once pushed out of the city by rising prices can return. Eventually the monument itself will be completely reused remaining only as a memory in the new urban fabric it composes.
The project team was: Darren Snow, Donal Lally, Conor McGowan, Jarlath Cantwell, Sky Lo Tian Tian, Marc Aurel Schnabel, UCD and CUHK. The team would like to thank Hugh Campbell and UCD for their support and also K+K Hong Kong.
