We often refer to the life of buildings.  We are not as comfortable referring to their end.  While buildings do not live in a biological sense, they are vessels of memory and artifacts of the time in which they were built.  While we have noble intentions in preserving the past for the future, our current methodologies of restoration, preservation and reuse can limit our appreciation of the richness of a building’s overall story.  

Ruins or historic sites that cannot be traditionally preserved or restored either due to financial or material resources offer new opportunities to present a site in the richness of its full historical context.  By providing an infrastructure or framework around a historic object, visitors are able to explore and interpret sites and historic structures for themselves in different contexts through individual explorations of history and geology (looking towards the past) and group gatherings and events which build new memories, stories and histories through present experiences.

This project develops a site infrastructure around a ruin of a tower house on the west coast of Ireland.  The master plan and design of individual components creates a progression through added interventions which provide both visual frames towards the ruin and opportunities to learn more about the history of the building.  The culmination of the experience is an ascension through a double spiral staircase which mimics historic forms of the castle ruin while also allowing an intimate experience of the building’s form and the texture of deterioration.

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For further information, see full thesis book available here.