A Collection of Follies: Five Notes on the Irish Landscape

When one thinks about Ireland, its landscape comes immediately to mind. The variety seen in vegetation, topography, colors and textures, combined with the low demographic density verified in the majority of its territory, consolidates the image of the island as a rich collection of natural scenarios. However, beyond its beauty, the same landscape is also a living reminder of major historical events. From Mesolithic passage tombs to medieval monasteries, from abandoned copper mines to ghost housing estates, from WWII pillboxes to the recently demolished British Towers of the border, the Irish landscape, as the architecture embedded in it, is an ever-changing product of its past and a representation of its culture and its people. In the case of the Northwestern region of Ireland, new border conditions and political frictions may introduce complexities to the current reality. In face of Brexit, the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is reintroduced as a subject of discussion, twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement. At the same time, the prospective implementation of the Atlantic Corridor as part of the Ireland 2040 plan is expected to trigger new transformation processes in terms of economic development of the countryside and densification of the towns along the corridor. If history of landscape is intimately related to political and social trajectories, its relationship with human society is often mediated by architecture. Buildings have the ability of embodying meaning, reflecting through its formal elements the necessities and aspirations of the time. The positioning of an architectural artifact in the landscape – towers, obelisks, gates, temples – was usually the symbol of the human effort in overcoming nature, a metaphor about domination and power. Hence, considering that the binomial architecture-landscape is a representation of a broader context, the importance of its comprehension is not restricted to the reconstitution of a historical line, but also serves as a starting point to reflections about the impact that economic, political and social dynamics have on landscape. Looking to the past as means to address matters of the present and the future, the project aims to discuss the Irish landscape through the lenses of the architectural discipline.Necessarily XX