Creating a New Public Square

Through building on ideas about the Picturesque and the Sublime there will be an agora-inspired ruin of the existing hotel. Through the study of key texts in the Pamphlet of Semester One, spatial and physical qualities were established which help tell the story of the hotel in the scheme. By careful consideration of beauty and violence through Rose Macaulay’s book Pleasure of Ruins, there seemed to be a picturesque quality to ruins that developed from the 18th century through poetry.

However, the Troubles in Ireland tested this taste for ruins to its limit, where ruin related more to melancholy thoughts than aesthetic pleasure. The proposal aims to change this connotation through a strategic demolition of the existing hotel as well as re-introducing elements from its previous iterations. The main hotel of Belleek, called the Glen Eden Hotel has been abandoned since a Christmas party in 2017, and concludes Belleek High Street. Located not far from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, it has been a site of great history and conflict. It creates a boundary between the public face of Belleek, through its connection to the high street, and its private residential cottages to the back.

Even after its abandonment, the front of the hotel remained a natural meeting point for the community, therefore extending the existing public square seemed logical to provide a more generous space. The scheme will include a café and community hall to encourage community gathering, six accommodation rooms which are replicates of the old hotel and allow for a reflective atmosphere and finally, the existing underground leisure centre is transformed into a public bath house. There will be 3 different materials in the scheme that define elements. First, the existing structure which will be left to ruin, revealing the concrete blockwork. Then the re-introduction of the old hotel elements in white concrete, through analysing the bombed hotel during the troubles, certain elements will be re-introduced to change their connotations from violence to beauty. The choice of concrete reflects the materiality of the existing hotel whilst the colour focuses on the form, reflecting the past without imitating it. Finally, the spaces created in the scheme will be in timber as well as beams and scaffolding which provide stability and viewpoints of the town.

The timber as scaffolding also aims to show the hotel off as something precious in need of protection. The old hotel garden will also be re-introduced into the existing hotel carpark, which has become a dumping ground, to redevelop the ecosystem lost. Also, the existing public pathway which runs in front of the existing hotel will be re-routed through the scheme encouraging interaction between people of Belleek and visitors.