IT is not often that the art area of a newspaper deals with the aesthetic advantages of a sewage work. But then there are only a few facilities that are designed with the finesse of the new wastewater treatment plant of € 139 million in Arklow (£ 117 million), which stands on the edge of the Irish lake like a few Minnygrüner pagodas. There are also not many architectural companies that thought so deeply above the poetics of the waste water as Clancy Moore.
“There is a wonderful passage in Ulysses,” says Andrew Clancy, co -founder of Practice, and James Joyce conjures up when we tipped along a metal game over a gigantic trapper brother made of bubbling brown mud on toe tips. “The narrator turns on the tap to fill a kettle and triggers a long rumination of where the water comes from, as it flows from reservoirs through aqueduct and pipes, and describes every step in a tiny detail, from volume of the tank to the dimensions and costs of the surface.”
There cannot be a lot of sewage work that Joyce quotes (despite the Irish author's skatological inclinations). But Clancy's point is that there is an entire universe of water treatment, storage and distribution, which is rarely celebrated or even thought about it. It takes place under our feet and out of sight, in a world that is hidden under the ground and is hidden from the city in anonymous scales behind high fences.
Not in Arklow. Wastewater has been at the top of the Spirit of the place – and inevitable on the beach – since it had no water treatment plant at all. This city-45 miles south of Dublin in County Wicklow on the southeastern coast of Ireland has pumped into the avoca river from its 13,500 inhabitants in the Avoca River, which takes him directly to the sea. The European Commission took note. In the past two decades, consecutive decisions of the European Court of Justice have found that Ireland has constantly violated its wastewater treatment guidelines and has been beaten with high fines because they have repeatedly not fixed the situation. The lack of waterworks was also a brake in the development of the city: without a treatment plant, no new houses could be built. Something had to be done.
A sewage system was first proposed for Arklow in 1988, but was disputed in a generation-long dispute over his location, one of the longest planning fights in the history of the district. It was originally built in the Norddocks, then an area named Seaabank that the city shared bitterly. Some argued that the place is susceptible to erosion, others that it was a rare type of rose hair worm. The well -equipped owners of a nearby Caravan Park decided to bring the Council to the Supreme Court. Twelve years later, they finally lost the case in 2011. But they ultimately won the battle: until then the 10-year building permit of the work had expired.
“We had to start all over,” says Michael Tinsley, project manager at Irish Water, or Uisce Éireann, the state water company founded in 2013, which took over the controversial project. “This time we spoke to absolutely everyone.” After considering numerous options, they met in a place where the work was originally proposed, on the site of a former Wallboard factory in the Ferrybank on the North Quay von Arklow. It was a topographical low and therefore required the least pump. Unusually, the national planning authority insisted that an architect will be involved in an important felbirge of the entire city, in which future development is planned. In Clancy's eyes, this should be such a monument to the citizens' infrastructure.
“Think of the Sydney Opera House,” he says, making a comparison with the most famous building on the water in the world. “It takes up the most famous location in the city. But not many people actually go into the opera. If they were building a city, they would probably think of the feces before they thought of the opera.”
He has a point. Instead of trying to arouse the Bilbao effect through the construction of a cultural palace, Arklow has increased the prosaic with a dung cathedral, like many great Victorian pumping station. It is an earthy anthem for the fact that the locals may finally be able to swim without being afraid of swimmers.
Even on a deep gray day, the complex is an elegant thing that can be met. The two huge processing sheds are on the horizon like oceanliners, their profiles, which are jagged with lamellae, and give them the appearance of concertinina paper lanterns that gently glow at night. A single cyclopean window grabs every building at sea, one looking back into the city-while the slats are inverted and enlarged at the top and form a cange-like crown. They have an almost caricaturist presence from a distance, their oversized gills, a caricature of ventilation and at the same time offer habitats for bats and birds.
Close to close up a different character. The long horizontal Louvres (consisting of fiber cement panels that are screwed to a reduced steel frame) are corrugated and are reminiscent of the corrugated pantiles of a Chinese temple. Your Celadon Green Fern strengthens this allusion, although here the color refers to local sports teams as well as Sea Thistle and the fuselage from Arklow shipping boats. A third laboratory building – scaled like a Dinky toy – looks like a cheeky creature that keeps an eye on the process. The facade welcomes you with a wink at the entrance to the location, a single, eye -like window over a protruding nose -like canopy and a butterfly roof that forms two cheeky ears.
Composition games are played with shape and scale. The walls of the smaller building are dressed with smooth fields of the same min to the large sibling, with each layer tipping out at an angle to reproduce their Louvres. Both the laboratory building and the treatment shed sit on chunky triangular support supports, the concrete was supplied with electricity to reveal its coarse -grained unit, which, in contrast to the paper thin Louvres mentioned above, results in a rust. The attention to detail is remarkable for an industrial complex, although even the corners of the scales are carefully cut and folded inwards, where the Louvres meet as if they were cut with a scalpel. Everything has a model -like quality that creates more with the precision of one of the beguiling paper sculptures by the German artist Thomas Demand as its usual sewage shed.
The process of protecting this design detail, which is so often lost in projects of this size, was unusual. “There are no drawings in the tender package for water treatment work,” says Clancy, whose company is more used to designing private houses. “Because it is right to assume that technological developments exceed the speed of public procurement.” As a result, the architects had to implement their design into precise text passages, which means that the conditions and parts of their facades are anchored in the demanding legalesis, which means that the design is contractually binding.
“We also made sure that the architecture was the cheapest,” he adds. Tinsley estimates that the architecture is about 3% of the total project costs. “At some point we had some internal debates at Irish Water, and colleagues thought we would give money for a large, unusual building,” he says. “But it is in the edge of the error – the architectural costs were put in the shade by the inflation costs.”
In addition, the architects brought more than just a pleasant packaging. As mediators, negotiators and catalysts within a team of special engineers – from odor control to tunnels, marine ecology and highways – they were the adhesive that tied everything together. They also brought new innovations. While a conventional system pumps from tank to tank to tank sewage, the system in Arklow is stacked, which means that the water is only pumped once, whereby the rest of the process occurs through gravity, which reduces energy consumption. The roofs of the entire structure (which is normally open air) also enabled currency cranes for future maintenance and maintenance as well as a solar parm that creates about a third of the entire energy requirement.
It took a long time and the people in Arklow are rightly relieved. As Tinsley clearly puts it: “Nobody wants to be the largest city in Ireland, with shit into the river.”
On the British mainland we can only dream of such a civilization. Since England's water industry was privatized in 1989, it has recorded a race on the floor, whereby the infrastructure breaks down while the shareholders benefit from bumper dividends. Leaving the EU has only accelerated the decline and heated up a significant increase in raw water into our waterways. As Ireland has shown, nationalization is the only way to clean up the chaos – and it can even bring things of beauty into the process.