The Rambling Houses at Fartha were proposed as a set of three experimental structures, demonstrations of local skills and built in locally sourced materials. Rambling houses were found in old Irish villages, gathering places for music and storytelling, places open to the passer-by. The material quality of two old farmhouses at Fartha were a starting point for this conversation between architects and makers, resilient structures having supported life and community for many generations.
Stone Vessel, the second in the series, built across the spring, summer and autumn months of 2023, is a development out of more than ten years’ collaboration between architects and makers. Together we have made a series of Vessels; Oak Vessel in layers of oak and light-catching gold leaf, Unfinished Museum, carved out of alabaster. Stone Vessel is similar in idea to these smaller objects, but it works at a different scale, larger in its dimensions, monumental in its presence, but no less intimate.
- RIAI Award - Special Award for Collaboration between Designers and Craftspersons
Stone Vessel is aligned east-west to catch the rising and setting sun. A faceted structure, it is a shrine-like gathering house, chamfered at its corners, sharply angled in its outline against the sky. And, inside this prismatic profile, within this solid shape, a softer interior is hollowed out, an acoustic space, a curvilinear cavern, a dynamic volume scooped out of the static form.
Its design process begun with notebook sketches and was tested in a series of models increasing in scale.
The outline of the structure was then set out on site. The geometry was drawn in the air at scale 1:1, with lines of string tied to scaffold poles. This three-dimensional network of different-coloured strings survived for the duration of the construction. Cornerstones were offered up against the lines of string, measured, and cut to fit. 3d printed models were a useful reference on site, but alignment with the strings was the final reality check.
As the work progressed, starting with four stonemasons, growing to fifteen as more masons and their assistants joined the team; one woman came from France, another team arrived from Japan.
The building site rang with the sound of hammer and chisel, with the convivial rhythms of masons working together. Knowledge and techniques were shared. Historical structures were visited, so we could learn together as a team. Japanese masons, who built the boundary walls, started by selecting boulder stones from the quarry on site, stones that the Irish masons had rejected.
The curvilinear shape of the interior volume was set out with a timber clock-like template suspended from the ridge line scaffold pole, the clock-hands rotated a little with each corbelled course and gradually shortened, step by step, as the form closed in. In the course of the work, a collaborative commitment to effort emerged between the masons, a spirit of meitheal. Part of the meaning of the project, the creative engagement of minds in the beauty of work made by hand, was discovered in the process of the work.
Stone Vessel was assembled by hand, stone on stone. It was built within the limitations of available material, walls made of roughly coursed fieldstone, Cork sandstone quarried out of the immediate site, with locally sourced harder limestone from south Tipperary, used for quoins and lintels. The form depends on the forces of gravity, the walling respects the natural bed of the stone, the roof rises in a corbelled structure.
The floor is stone, the walls are stone, and the roof is stone. Wall lanterns were made by a local blacksmith, oil lamps in beaten copper, held on brackets drawn in bronze.
We wanted to use a thousand-year-old technology to test a contemporary idea, to stretch old ways of working to search for something new, to imagine a synthesis of space and volume and structure, a resonant integrity rarely experienced in modern construction.
Publications:
- RTÉ One, 14.08. 2024, Meeting the makers, and creating an architectural wonder in Cork ↗︎
- house + design, 09 2024, Making through collaborating, Rambling Houses by Joseph Walsh and O'Donnell + Tuomey, Sandra Andrea O’Connell PDF
- Roca Gallery, , Three Rambling Houses, A collaboration between architectural design and the craft of making PDFPDF↗︎