Having been “unchained” from the British rule, the Irish took the post-WWII landscape as an opportunity to show, that they can do it better than their former masters. To boost the new-born economy, the first international airport was built alongside the world’s first special economic zone – both coined Shannon – creating a powerful economic tool, that spread across the world.
The Zone unfortunately carried all the aspects of an actual dream - it was a fiction. Its frivolity is evident in the destruction of the peat environment. This ancient habitat has been excavated and drained to the point of extinction, standing as the most threatened, yet ignored ecosystem in the world.
Similar negligence is evident in the urbanism. Being the first modernist project, Shannon is not a city, rather a continuous periphery of stuff – a suburb in search of a city. The Promethean promises of the next European metropolis proved unfulfilled, leaving Shannoners in a crisis, nostalgic for a future that never arrived.
Nostalgia is the key emotion tied to the shortcomings Shannon. Condemning it, however, as a destructive emotion would be unfair. Instead, the aim is to rehabilitate it and deploy it as a tool for the exhausted social, economic and environmental reality – one, that does not condescend a romanic past, but embraces it, grounds it in the current reality and even proposes a speculative future.
In three phases, architecture becomes a tool to design within intergenerational, more-than-human, planetary time, stretching in the deep past and the deep future.
The first stage of the project is one of urban regeneration within a foreseeable future. By excavating the hills, new urban passages are created, connecting the divided residential and industrial zones. A new urban centre is suggested in form of a dynamic and iterative public plaza. Lastly, a series of walls are scattered, guiding inhabitants between fragmented zones. Nostalgia is not sentimental here, on the contrary, serves as a tool of strengthening the present urban reality.
Stretching beyond the human lifespan, the aim of the second phase is to offer local environmental repair. By allowing the largest carbon sink in the world to spill across the city, peat is freed from Zone’s control and encouraged to act on its own terms in establishing a new peatland environment. It becomes its own agent with continuous presence. Nostalgia is not regretting the loss, but a means of regeneration, where the past is never done, once and for all.
The ambition of the third phase pushes environmental repair even further, by raising awareness about peatlands loss beyond human temporality and the borders of Shannon. In a far future, in which the conflict with the Zone is long passé, but peatlands loss is certainly not, it is peat itself, that decides to be the new generative entity, turning the city and the interventions into a new setting for narration and story-telling, in turn helping to socio-economically rejuvenate Shannon and spread peat across the globe. Only then can the nostalgia for the future be finally fulfilled.
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