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Rionnach Maoim

Part 2 Project 2021
Lewis Brown
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
This project explores the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place. It is a word hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in relation to the rivers, hedgerows, bogs, fields and edge lands uneasily known as the Isle of Lewis. The remarkable referential exactitude of a glossary uncovered by locals to protect their land was gathered in a Counter Desecration Phrasebook, and the poetry of its terms, are adopted and animated through an architecture that is born out of a language deeply embedded within the landscape.

An architectural language of impermanence, loose-fit structures and permeable enclosures compliment and contribute to the nature of the fluid landscape. Domestic typologies and vernacular architecture are replaced by a lexicon of architectural devices that allow the house for animators to occupy and take advantage of the wet bog landscape. The project then, unfolds as a study of a landmass many see as having nothing in it – the peatlands of The Brindled Moor on Lewis. A site, like so many of the empty places in the Highlands and Islands, under threat of becoming unseen, unheard, mute – which is to say, inanimate – in the planning of its future.

Lewis Brown

Tutor(s)
Paddi Alice Benson
Ana Bonet Miró
Mark Dorrian
2021
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