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Urban Fragments: Bronze Foundry, Kilkenny City, Ireland

Part 1 Project 2012
Amy Hore
University College Cork | Ireland
Urban Fragments is a project of Regeneration in Kilkenny city, Ireland. Redeveloping existing site conditions and reworking the city’s medieval history which has been left behind and in disrepair. The building works not simply as an object but as part of the city grain and city life.

Design_Making_Selling
Kilkenny has a history of design and making. This project challenges the scale of the site itself as well as the scale of a ‘design making selling’ industry within a small city. It has the potential to introduce a regenerated design culture into the city.

This project of Urban regeneration takes the form of a bronze foundry. The programme contains large design workshops, metal workshops, exhibition space, education and selling across a number of lanes within the city centre. The building filters through these open lanes becoming a hub of design within the city rather than a closed entity. The project breathes a new life into the city in terms of its design, its purpose and its renewal of the city grain that has forgotten its potential in this part of the city.

The Urban Fragments Project is located on the lanes that branch off to the west of High Street, the winding centre of the city. It maintains the site boundaries of the former buildings with respect to buildings of architectural interest that surround it. The form of this building is simple. The heavy brick walls respond to the history of the industry and site, whilst the high pitched spaceframe timber structure of the roof and glazed rooflights take it beyond a romantic tribute to an antique vocation.


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2012
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