Beginning with the notions of impermeability that have long persisted in Derry’s urban environment, this project opts for a symbiotic para-situation in Derry’s urban ecosystem. Doire, originally known as Oak Forrest, has experienced tremendous sectarianism, resulting in a “fencing fever” that spread through the city. In addition to the striking presence of Derry’s ancient citadel wall, urbanism in this area has fostered divisions among the city’s various organs.
Conversely, Derry’s natural realm tells the tale of a completely different scenario of lush greenery along the Foyle, the symphony of insects and birds, and the salmon migration phenomenon in its estuary are testaments to coexistence in a transient, indeterminate, and soaked inter- and intra-territoriality. Wetness knows no boundaries, which forms the basis for the soaking urbanism concepts as agency of calming the “Fencing Fever”
The design research project aims to primarily envision the architectural and urban scope of the long-cherished University of Derry as urban catalysts within this theatre of urbanism. By deploying soaking phenomena and methodologies that promote ecosophic symbiosis and dematerialization of the historical, physical, and metaphorical “fence,” it visualizes a future to be reterritorialized over deep time by thickened urban edges, “thin places” of soaked co-existence and reciprocal plurality.
Theoretical discourses and design research methodologies from associated courses, measured intensities from the field trip, chronological and multiscale new visualizations of the metropolis, and revisiting historical maps converge to form a thematic argument that ultimately calls for a reclaiming of the “forgotten wetness,” specifically the Mary Blu’s Burn and the long-gone Bog ecology, as agencies of reterritorialized fluid occupancy and gradients of wetness within the urban fabric.
Architecture, as an apparatus of testing, has been employed to para-“situate” the hypothesis into the real context. The seven arbours of the university became operating tools to test the wet urbanism and dematerializing boundaries, reiterating the soaking hypothesis from urban to body scale. The grand arboretum, the conceptual core of the project, was conceived as a series of soaked urban public realms, extending its armature from the Bogside Marshland to the revived historic water basin in the Fountain. Perhaps integration and connecting the fountain and Bogside, two unique urban entities, both having their names from some kind of wetness yet historically becoming emblems of segregation, can be one of the prominent urban interventions the project intended at the very beginning.
On a greater scale, the 7 colleges, as shown in the new visualization 03, envision this future reality in the form of a continuous trail of amphibious ecology connecting the whole city on a TLML scale. Eventually, the metropoliton scale soaking hypothesis was extended to include building edges, which are conceived to dissolve, age, and thicken over deep time, blurring boundaries and accommodating
