Wenhao Sun

Daire & the Anti-Monument: Constructing Anti-Monuments

Architecture - MArch

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

salencefchai@163.com

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Constructing Anti-Monuments | 1.100 Main building model

Project description

Daire & the Anti-Monument explores the layered dynamics of power, belonging, and exclusion within the urban landscape. Traditionally, monuments reflect dominant cultural narratives and celebrate collective achievements. Yet, counter-monuments—less permanent, more poetic—emerge in the form of graffiti, music, protest, and gathering. These challenge mainstream ideologies and reimagine memory and identity in public space.

This project proposes an urban intervention rooted in the concept of the anti-monument. It disrupts conventional city planning with a new axis—both architectural and symbolic—that redefines movement, connection, and purpose within the urban block. Rather than reinforcing static ideals, this structure invites interaction, adaptability, and ecological integration.

Set in Derry’s Fountain neighbourhood, the intervention addresses the visible scars of industrial decline: vacant buildings, social fragmentation, and unemployment. As a direct response, the proposal envisions a Future-Skills Hub and Community Gathering Space within the abandoned Carlisle House, former Methodist church, and adjacent structures on Carlisle Road.

This design is not just about architecture—it’s about people. It creates a spatial framework where sound, light, and human presence shape the environment. Through active connections and inclusive volumes, the space fosters learning, social cohesion, and urban regeneration. The anti-monument becomes a catalyst for empowerment, not commemoration.

Aerial view Render of Skill Center

The Airc

Adding the anti-monument's conception, the design strategically employs new metal frameworks to establish an architectural dialogue with the existing industrial relics. These lightweight interventions perform a dual operation: they simultaneously preserve the material memory of the old structures while radically transforming their spatial logic. Through precise insertions and extensions, the project reconfigures the original building's boundaries, dissolving conventional distinctions between interior and exterior. The resulting hybrid spaces generate dynamic zones of interaction - where the weight of history and the lightness of contemporary intervention coalesce into a new kind of public territory.

Constructing Anti-Monuments | 1.500 Field model

Aerial view Render of Courtyard

Aerial view Render of Workshop

Fountain Green Corridor

*Group work with Xiang Gao

This project explores Daire’s urban neighbourhood traditionally known as ‘The Fountain’, marked by historical industrial success followed by sharp decline from the 1980s. This decline has led to widespread building abandonment and depopulation, neglect and decay, with high levels of unemployment, homelessness and mental illness and the resultant crime and decline in community spirit this inevitably brings.

To counter these negative, historic urban forces, we propose the development of a ‘Fountain Green Corridor’ running from the walled city to the River Foyle, anchored around two abandoned factory sites (incorporating new spatial programmes for rehabilitation and skills acquisition), to help revitalize the Fountain’s urban life and ecology and to prepare for future flooding that is predicted to reshape the city's landscape. Integrating a series of design strategies such as moveable edge structures, bridges, the greening of urban pathways and the restoration of the historic built fabric, this proposal will merge with the riverside and its water-based ecologies, forming a new civic gateway to the centre of the city.