AAI Site Visit: Arklow Waste Water Treatment Plant

Architect’s Description:

Arklow has never had a comprehensive sewerage treatment infrastructure. Its river and sea ecologies are radically affected by lack of a water disposal system and has left the town itself badly curtailed in its amenity and capacity for growth. Uisce Éireann have been planning the resolution of this matter for some time. Sites were selected with the aspiration to site the plant in an area which minimises energy and carbon use, and allows the plant and town to develop in tandem in the medium and long term. When the site selection process identified the Ferrybank site UÉ realised they would need to engage an architect as an intrinsic part of the design team – this site was highly visible, held between the river and the sea. Appointed as part of a quality oriented process in 2015, Clancy Moore have worked intensively across multiple design specialisms to shape the layout of the site and the design of the plant. Ordered to minimise pumping, to generate its own power, and to minimise exaction and site coverage, the plant is unlike any other water treatment plant of this scale. The buildings take the form of enabling infrastructure, with facades designed as expressive civic infrastructure.

Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore founded Clancy Moore Architects in 2008 and have gained an international reputation for projects including cultural, infrastructural, and residential works. The practice frequently works with complex or sensitive sites, such as that for the Arklow Wastewater project. The practice sees architecture as intrinsically tied to circumstance, in which multiple contingencies are set in conversation. This requires an open curiosity about the full breadth of the context of each project.

Both partners research and seek to advance architecture through critical enquiry and academic works. Both have PhDs in practice from RMIT. Andrew is Professor of Architecture in the Kingston School of Art London, while Colm directs the M.Arch in Queens University Belfast. Both are guest Professors at the Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio – directing a research and design atelier that investigates fictions and situated understandings as sites for architectural production.

Clancy Moore were voted Young Architects of the Year (YAYA) in 2018, awarded the AR Peter Davey Award in 2019, and twice nominated for the EU Mies Van der Rohe Award. Their book about the Danish Architect Kay Fisker was published by Lund Humphries in 2022, and a survey of their work will issue in late 2024 in the deAedibus series from Quart Verlag.