Layering & embedding: constructing assemblies along lines of landscape on Hook Head peninsula

Abstract

This research has been focused on concerns that sit at the heart of my practice regarding community, place, and dwelling in a landscape. It describes a working process that seeks to explicate the relationship between the construction of a landscape and how one constructs in that landscape.

Drawing has been used as the primary research methodology to surface the increment by which a landscape is formed and, in response to a new understanding developed in this process, the detailed constructed increment by which a designer finds the form of a building in that landscape.

That the landscape has a particular physicality is somehow present in my design work - the processes of the landscape’s formation (layering/gravity and embedment/force) and the nature of its interstices, provide me with a very direct attitude to assembly, a pragmatism, directly concerned with profile and fit, how one component is offered to another.

Techniques of drawing critical to my practice including plan, detail section, relief hatching are deployed in a representational process that gathers topography, geology, construction and memory together on paper. Critical to this process is the construction of very large drawings. Due to the bodily engagement necessary in the action of their making and the required duration for the author to be present in the work, a space of encounter with the territory depicted is established through drawing. In this immersive space histories of relationships personal, or universal, are drawn out.

The development of this drawing process has enabled a new understanding in my work of how a sense of a place, specifically its physicality, can be embodied in the tectonic assembly of a building and in doing so how a building’s expression can capture and communicate the nature of a place.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Colm Moore (Supervisor), Michael McGarry (Supervisor) & Greg Keeffe (Supervisor)