terryland waterworks + blackrock diving tower and promenade

Feargal McNamara

As this country waits impatiently for billions of pounds of extra infrastructure, there are questions about the form these opportunities will take. Galway's growth is similar to each townhese opportunities will take. Galway's growth is similar to each town and city in Ireland, but more than most, it is a victim of its own success. Terryland Waterworks and Blackrock Diving Tower & Promenade may be suggested as a defence of Galway's development over the last fifteen years. A defence due to their unique quality among the blandness that surrounds the city, demonstrating a potential, and defence of the city's continued development in the lessons that can be learned to realize this potential.

The buildings of the ring roads are not intended to serve any civic purrpose. The reason of their siting is predicated on being outside the city centre. Dual carriageways are ploughed through town lands and their names are recorded on meaningless signage. New infrastructure drives this proliferation, but what if infrastructure, not development, was used as a machine of place ?

Built in 1980, Terryland Waterworks carry and contain water from the surrounding hills and rivers to nourish the city dwellers. Blackrock Tower and Promenade carries people to water, and provides nourishing recreational activity. Both help the city to function in their separate ways. Built by engineers for local authorities, they sit between perceived notions of what constitutes infrastructure and architecture.

Occupying prominent sites on the outskirts of the city, they engage in the same lack of visual discretion as the developments of the recent past. Terryland Waterworks is on a hill overlooking the city and Blackrock Diving Tower at the end of a promenade that stretches over two miles along the seashore to the Claddagh Basin. These significant interventions onto the landscape are pieces of infrastructure that derive meaning from use rather than expression, engaging meaningfully with their particular context.

The Waterworks share the skyline with the Caathedral and the University at one of the main entrances to the city. Bloated housing recently built on marshland now forms an obstruction, but when viewed from the ring roads it still retains some of its presence. The waterworks rest on an expansive site, on a network of sunken pipes and pools, and seem like a huge grass and concrete machine. Each element plays a part in the process of treating the water, and the site becomes a manifestation of a diagram on the wall of the improbably cantilevered glass control box. The functional relationships are set, and the topography and context give clues as to the arrangement of the parts.

Concrete is used in various ways, but all of it precisely formed, from remarkable internal staircases to the profiled cones and drrums that store water and chemicals. These have weathered to a rusty glow, perhaps as result of the sea air. The use of steel provides when necessary both transparency and utility among the concrete containers. Most of the window joinery is iroko clad in aluminium plate and the colour of the glazing along the offices is a mixture of orange and purple due to wearing on its thermal shielding. This is visible from far away and is a very striking accident of slight disrepair. Also striking is how the complex changes shape as it is passed at speed, the cones and the glass box with its glass and steel link bridge whip around the long concrete wall of the treatment pools.

Blackrock Diving Tower and Promenade could be described as an infrastructure of play. The diviing tower is situated at the end of, and forms a right angle to the promenade. The tower is the conclusion of a series of shelters and slip-ways that bring the promenade to the sea along the sands of Salthill. It is a municipal amenity and there is no entrance gate or cafe.

The materials are the existing landscape of rock, seashore and field transformed and re.programmed by concrete to accommodate bathers. Its plasticity is used to make surfaces on which to dry-off and sunbathe, walls to sit on and shelter behind, slipways for boats, and seats for viewing. The concrete surfaces casually fuse different elements of nature and man-made for the use of the bathers while the generosity of space and its permanence allow rituals to develop. Through use of steel as rails, enclosures are made light and they may be leaned against or swung out of, a section that is not thick enough to sit on but thin enough to grip. As opposed to the concrete's solidity and spread, the steel's lightness and thinness does not offer shelter or space, but allows activity and ensures safety.

By adapting existing conditions the surface becomes a site of indeterminate interaction. The distribution of grass, rock, pebbles, timber, concrete and sand promote different activities and become the places where different groups congregate. A blanket of activity is created that can anticipate change over time ; it forms patterns of use and interaction that are the meaning of the place. This landscape can be best understood through activity or the senses, and the leisure experience is improved by the unpredictable activities this bizarre landscape provokes.

In both Terryland Waterworks and Blackrock Diving Tower and Promenade the language of the concrete and steel is unassuming yet precise, similar to the construction of roads and bridges. Their forms are pragmatic but come from a careful examination of place and programme.

The publshed volumes on infrastructural works by Claus and Hilda Becher make points about form, material, and repetition and are a valished volumes on infrastructural works by Claus and Hilda Becher make points about form, material, and repetition and are a valuable survey of post-industrial typologies. However these buildings were not only found as aesthetic objects, but were built to fulfil a function, and the original meaning was derived primarily from this use. Terryland and Blackrock are also being found as aesthetic objects, due to their stylistic similarity to recent trends.

Significant and meaningful buildings have always acted as mediators between reality and the imagination. The role of buildings as important representatives of shared cultural values has been compromised by the proliferation of media. Electronic communication cannot, however, replace the fundamental meaning of buildngs : they are permanent (relatively) and have all the complexity of real experience. At a time when post-modernism was the woings : they are permanent (relatively) and have all the complexity of real experience. At a time when post-modernism was the world-wide obsession, both Terryland and Blackrock differed by sharing aspects of the worth of permanence in the face of constant change, regardless of style or language. Both projects achieved this by careful attention to use and context.

Form matters in the significant transformations that occur each time a building is placed in its setting. The majority of the buildings surrounding Galway are meaningless and unimaginative, decorated sheds with a short life span and little contribution to the real live experience of Galway City. The interaction of a building with the environment is crucial to the reclamation of these recent developments as meaningful places. Terryland and Blackrock make place rather than space, while embodying an architecture that is useful. They both have the advantage of being municipal works. Perhaps the buildings surrounding our towns and cities could become more like these infrastructures ?

Feargal McNamara is an architect and is currently working with Murray O'Laoire Architects.