Project Description
Cultivating a Dalradian Sensibility is the culmination of process and output from a year spent scaling the Dalradian landscape in and around Shrove in County Donegal. The Dalradian landscape refers to the Stratified terrain of the Dalradian Supergroup. A sequence of rocks formed between 800 and 500 million years ago. Originally deposited as sediment and later transformed to metamorphic stone, at Shrove these rocks belong to the Appin subgroup and are characterised by a strong directional and layered structure as a result of extreme global geological pressure. Extending over from Scotland into Ireland the Dalradian Supergroup offers and alternative to a bordered world and is a physical manifestation of Deep Time.
In my work Deep Time is not an abstract concept. It is a condition whose current stage is perceived and encountered. The Dalradian landscape in Shrove offers a closer insight into this deep time world. The project seeks to situate human occupation within this framework, revealing the contrast between the enduring processes of the Earth and the relative brevity of human making.
Moreover, the project explores how an architecture at Shrove can cultivate a deeper awareness of geological time and material responsibility through situated practice on the Dalradian coastline of Inishowen. Structured across three interrelated stages—Rocklarking for the Submerged Soul, Traversing the Dalradian Mind, and the Centre for Dalradian Use Misinterpretation—the work moves from site-reading to architectural intervention and finally to civic proposition. Through the act of “rocklarking,” a tactile and embodied engagement with the schist landscape, the research establishes a method for understanding place beyond the visual, grounded in movement, resistance, and exposure. This sensibility is then translated into architectural form, where the enduring nature of Dalradian schist is set against the temporal fragility of mica concrete, making visible the ethical failures of contemporary construction. The final project proposes a community-focused institution that operates as both a support hub for those affected by the defective block crisis and a research centre for land us. Across all stages, the work positions architecture not as a static object, but as an evolving practice of looking forwards and to reveal the tensions between permanence and impermanence, responsibility and misinterpretation.
