The COMPLETE Belleek

The contextually sensitive project explores the relationship between a town and industry that share the same name. Belleek. Belleek Pottery re-defined ‘Belleek’ as ‘a kind of thin fragile porcelain with a lustrous glaze’, changing its original Irish meaning Beal Leice, ‘the ford-mouth of the flagstone’ relating to its situation on the River Erne in the West of Ireland. After thorough research exploring explicit and obscure relationships between the town and industry, the project began by recreating the pottery’s ‘Belleek: Complete Collection’, this time integrating the town of Belleek.

Research led to the proposal of a considered strategic masterplan, locating four significant sites to the historical relationship of Belleek Pottery and town. The sites of Rose Isle, where the pottery mills once sat, the out-of-use train station that once transported goods and redundant town hall will respectively house the responsive industrial pottery studios, artists' residency, and a re-designed town hall to re-connect the town with the veiled industrial vernacular at the back of the factory. The project focuses on the comprehensive design of the industrial studios to re-enhance the relationship between the public and potters.

The arrangement of the proposal takes cues from the existing and historical site of Rose Isle, once made up of three small islands with surrounding canals. Infilled over the course of the 1880s-1950s Erne Drainage Scheme, today the undistinguished, tarmacked site is an un-required staff car park, physically divided from the town by a metal fence. Challenging the prominent front of the 165-year-old pottery building the proposals form flips the idea of front and back as a secondary aim to re-establish the endangered heritage craft of industrial pottery. By placing the single-storey at the front and the three-storey building at the back, the design maximises views over the River Erne, contextualising users inside the building and highlighting the reason for the pottery’s original positioning. Challenging the solid mass of the factory, the footprint follows the old edges of Rose Isle and is adapted from the dispersed buildings that once sat on the site to create an openness between the town and industry. Courtyard areas act as an expansion of the pottery into the public domain and are tiled in a terrazzo, speckled with white waste / smashed pottery from the factory as part of an act to be environmentally conscious.

Generating hydroelectric power from the river, electricity for the kilns is serviced in a tower suggestive of the old bottle kilns that once fired the clay. Playing with the scale of the existing factory’s pitches the proposal maximises rainwater harvesting and uses material qualities of exposed clay plaster rendering to improve indoor air quality as well as ceramic tile rain screen cladding to increase thermal efficiency and weatherproofing.