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FieldWork

Part 2 Project 2007
Justin Hayes
University College Dublin | Ireland
The systematic harvesting of the central boglands of Ireland for energy production has scarred the midland landscape leaving 80,000 hectares of post-industrial cutaway bog.

FieldWork is an investigation into the continued process of re-casting of the land and attempts to provide potential opportunites for the site's unknown future by strategically re-interpreting its historical and cultural memories.

A new layer of infrastructure is constructed from the by-product of the peat power stations, making the large land bank accessible to the public whilst also defining new landscape rooms for agriculture, new eco-industries, recreation and wetland marshes. The re-structuring of the land will encourage and support new ecologies whilst also returning the midland landscape into a natural carbon sink.

Justin Hayes


Cast within a context of the mechanical harvesting and near exhaustion of peat resources within Ireland, FIELDWORK represents a comprehensive investigation and strategic reinterpretation of the extensive midland bogs, achieving a re-structuring of this culturally potent landscape in a manner sufficiently indeterminant to enable a recasting of its use without loss of historical, mythological or cultural status.

Archaeological, industrial and ideological histories inform the network of landrooms, a reserve for agriculture and recreation, while hovering overhead the attenuated form of a water resevoir operates on the scale of the geographic, reinforcing larger orders across the landscape, simultaneous to serving for recreation as well as the industrial processes of a hemp panel factory sheltered below. A potent balance of pragmatism and the sublime, from geographic strategy to constructed detail, the proposal envisions a complex and culturally rich future for the Irish Midlands.

2007
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