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Carlingford: Town Museum

Part 1 Project 2022
Richard James Kirk
Cardiff University | UK
Situated on the Irish border, a location left in flux following the UK’s decision to leave the EU, the town museum project stems from the Brady Amendment’s proposal of introducing ‘alternative arrangements’ along the Irish border.

The project suggests an alternative definition and treatment of architectural histories, imagining the incorporation and extrapolation of urban histories into the present spatial environment to expose their value, creating a self-descriptive ‘Town Museum’.

In Carlingford, urban fragments such as medieval castles and disused sheds are built into the town’s morphology, paying attention to the left-overs of the world and equipping them with dignity. Past values and meanings can be read within Carlingford’s fabric, the town becoming a pedagogical space comprised of ambiguous remnants of the past: the back of a convenience store or its corresponding architectures.

The Town Museum does not discriminate between fragments, placing the towns canonical histories of Normans and Kings on an equal footing with back alleys or false windows, preserving a myriad of histories regardless of status.

Buildings in the town museum are not hygienic in their design; they are messy, anachronistic and highly contextual, framing specific histories to be read and preserved, their design distilling the museum’s ideology.

Richard James Kirk

Tutor(s)
Michael Corr
Tom Keeley
2022
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