RIAI | Irish Architecture Awards

Citation

This is an example of a one-off house in the countryside that sits lightly in its setting and yet has a strong presence. The house has dark elements, just as the surrounding land does, and yet respects and provides a platform for the beauty of the scenery by letting it shine through the building. Tread softly for you tread upon our Donegal.

Architect's Comments:

The project concerns itself with the specifics of the site and putting the personal and particular experiences above the powerful and the public, it seeks to create a mood which is meditative instead of tensing or relaxing. The site is hidden from the public road and is accessed from high ground on the landward side where the first experience is of an elevated view of the site and the sea beyond. Therefore the importance of the roof, or fifth façade, dictated a metal zinc cladding which is suitable for both walls and roof. The plan form was inspired by the traditional narrow cottage and is orientated on a north south axis. It contains three sleeping cells and auxiliary spaces in the middle with two living areas, one at each end connected by a library. The step and entry ramp at the front door is disconnected from the building thus making the visitor step over a gap not unlike stepping from the static platform onto a passing train.

Client's Comments:

For us, ‘Tuath na Mara’ is wonderfully paradoxical: profoundly contextual and strikingly free-floating. It is contextual in two senses: Firstly it speaks to the built experience of both our families, being the width of a house on the west coast that has been in the family for generations, and having the name and some of the shape of a house built by a Scottish grandparent (‘Tuath na Mara’ equally well in Scots and Irish Gaelic). Secondly it is rooted in the Donegal landscape, or more precisely in the inter-tidal seascape with which it shares its colour and, very nearly, its location. From the sea, it is virtually invisible. But it is also free-floating, both in the way it sculpts light internally, and in the way its design is part of a cosmopolitan architectural conversation that is above national boundaries. This global-local interchange marks it out as capable of belonging only to the 21st century.