Alexander Ritchie

Lough Foyle, an aqueous territory held between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, where a palimpsest of borders, colonial legacies, and quantifying impulses inscribe themselves thinly across a deep landscape of tidal flux, ecological attrition, and infrastructural decay.

The method of the border emerges as a response to uncertainty: the ambiguous volumes of water are subjected to the logics of hard engineering. Land is raised from ambiguity and subsumed into regimes of ownership. The sea wall, an artefact of ordinance, materialises this ambition.

Yet, the uncertainty of climate change challenges this paradigm. Sea levels will rise, while unpredictable weather surges already transgress the certainties of the wall. 

Thus, the project asks, rather than employing ever greater technologies to control a dynamic ecology, we may seek a new paradigm: uncertainty becomes a generator, rather than to be controlled, enabling new forms of social, territorial, and spatial mutuality within a total ecology.

The wall is reimagined not as a border, but as a critical zone of exchange—a locus where revived intertidal salt marshes are cultivated, and the former border becomes an island territory, nurturing opportunities for publics, education, research, and materiality across intertidal states.

The project seeks architecture as a situated practice, endemic to a diffuse and uncertain network of relations, rather than a master of site.