RIAI | Irish Architecture Awards

Citation

Dublin Over €300,000

This is waste water management like we have never seen it before !

Defying any immediate pat, architectural reading - the building stands or slouches (depending on your viewpoint) by the side of the road, land-marking Clontarf and mile-stoning the coastline. Impenetrable, unfathomable, playful, sculptural - throw words at it and they bounce right off. Yet this is this building's strength. Going well beyond the functional requirements of an enclosure for technical apparatus, a choice of form and materials has been skillfully employed, which honours the wonderful workings of waste-water management, whilst heightening our very awareness and appreciation of it.

Architect's Comment
As part of a programme of public space design initiatives for Dublin City Council in association with the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, a phased programme of works was developed to reinforce and amplify the existing amenity of the village centre at the junction of Vernon Avenue and the Clontarf Road on Dublin's northern coastline.

The first phase required redevelopment of an existing pump station with the provision of a maintenance depot for Dublin City Council Parks Department and an ESB substation. The dilapidated structure was removed above ground while maintaining all pump operations below. A new folded plate superstructure of reinforced concrete forming an interlock of canted walls and roof slabs was cast in situ onto the extended existing concrete two-storey basement.

The new volume rotates across the reclaimed ground to catch the light and open relationships with the Clontarf Road, the village, the sea wall and the docklands beyond the estuary. This massing intimates the internal interrelationship of the tripartite programme within the single object. A closed public building, each façade opens alternately to pump station, park depot or electrical substation, each autonomous but linked spatially by a shared requirement for natural ventilation in a folded slot of space which incorporates the requirements for separate toilet /shower facilities and water tank.

The structure and access doors are dressed in a prepatinated copper shingle rain screen to envelope the form as a continuous wrapping; it is punctured twice by the ventilation slot which is expressed in untreated iroko louvers and will weather grey. On each exposure this patination will develop differently to exaggerate the modelling of the enclosure. This skin is eroded to the east allowing the gathered rain waters to discharge over and stain the shot blasted concrete, the building being considered as a gutter.

Clients' Comment
The decade 1896 to 1906 represented the golden age of Drainage Works in Dublin. The city's first main drainage system, Sewage Treatment Works and sludge disposal system were constructed. The North Dublin Drainage System was constructed in the 1950's in more frugal times. The original Vernon Avenue Pumping Station, which was part of this system, was particularly unattractive. The rectangular station building was flanked by public conveniences. In recent years these toilets had fallen into disuse. The area around the building became a location for antisocial behaviour.

The 1990's saw something of a renaissance in Drainage Development in Dublin. Under the Dublin Bay Project a pumping station was constructed at Sutton to transfer North Dublin flows via a submarine pipeline to a new Treatment Works at Ringsend.
As a complimentary measure to the Dublin Bay Project a programme to upgrade key coastal stations at Clontarf, Vernon Avenue and Kilbarrack was undertaken.

This programme very much took into account the environmental setting of these stations.  De Paor Architects were the Architects for the new Vernon Avenue building. They worked as part of a multidisciplinary team to ensure its full functionality as a pumping station.

The outer design follows a marine theme. The inner functionality includes state of the art pumping and control equipment. This inner equipment protects the marine environment from pollution by urban sewage and storm waters.