Building on Bogs

It will not have escaped your attention that we in IAF, with our partners 12th Field architects, have been spending some time out of the city and down on the bogs. Almost three years in fact. As this is published, we are between stops on a tour of a bright yellow timber structure, the Bog Bothy. This is the first structure of what we are calling ‘a new peatlands architecture’, designed by 12th Field and developed over time and in close collaboration with peatlands communities in Offaly, Louth, and Meath. The Bothy is touring from the daisy filled meadow of Sheridan’s Field overlooking the majestic Clara Bog, right down to the ground of Girley Bog in Meath, where it remains for August as part of National Heritage Week.

You might wonder why we are building on the bog, such a seemingly precious and fragile landscape? The truth is, in Ireland, we have always built on the bog.

This durational placemaking project, which has resulted in a Bothy, was meticulously researched, discussed, imagined and then tested with people and for them. Our hope is that these might be built in many bogs, offering shelter and places to stay or gather. Indeed, this is what has happened in Clara all of July, with a variety of people travelling to visit and people nearby opening it up and enjoying the view.

In a way, it is built from and with the most sustainable and fragile of resources, people’s stories. This is one of the best parts of placemaking, a time consuming and patient process where talk of now and then, the variety of lives lived by the peatlands communities who are deeply part of this project, becomes the means to build a shared future, not years from now, but actually now, in a field, a thing you can touch and use. We have always built on the bog, and thus the Bothy is part of a bog building tradition, conscious that architecture and placemaking have a real role to play in a just transition and that new uses are needed in and for this place.

Even still, huts, tracks, factories, machines, and sheds are physical traces of the built bog, an almost infinite archive of once local labour and national ambition. The bog is a place with which communities have long moulded their lives, their histories folding and furrowing into and out of the green-grey ground.

Building remains an extractive and demanding process, but building is not architecture, and architecture is more than building. Architecture is a dialogue between creation and care, a negotiation between human ingenuity and the passage of time.

As we face impending ecological collapse, our attention is turning to that which already exists. And as we work with and care fully for all that exists, architecture might now transition into a practice of collective stewardship, playing a vital role in any peatland future.

It has been said that at the heart of stewardship lies human relationships, where people negotiate the use of shared resources and, in the context of architecture, together shape the future of the environment around them. Stewardship is also a series of relationships between human and non-human life, and sustaining this reciprocity now appears key to our survival.

For the last few years we have also been working with artists, first Shane Hynan and now Luke Casserly. Their ongoing work with us and in their own ‘bog practice’ has further nourished our work and drawn both IAF and 12th Field deeper into the bog landscape and its communities.

It is not so much that cameras don’t lie – more that, in the right hands, they reveal things you would not otherwise see. Each one of Hynan’s photographs is moving back and forth through time, pulling the history of place into the right now, and drawing any divisive future plans into real and present conversations about the challenges of what it means to be of, live in, and act with a landscape as complex as a bog. If Hynan is looking, Casserly is listening. He is drawing out – literally and emotionally – stories of the people he meets, walking them through places already familiar, toward other ways of knowing their place, working toward a collective soundscape to emerge later this autumn.

As an architecture project, Bog Bothy is neither a set of romantic reveries on the peatlands past nor wild imaginings of some fantastic future. Rather, it is an opportunity, a collection of climate focused constructions, conversations, and characters around which you are all invited to gather down on Girley Bog this August.

Bog Bothy seeks to engage and collaborate with whatever and whomever already exists, peering beneath the surface, emerging from the ground up, looking toward a horizon, towards a more connected, climate- and community-led future.

‘Beneath the surface, we are connected’ – Kae Tempest

Photos by Brendan Keogh. Bothy designed by 12th Field. Exhibition photos by Shane Hynan and drawings by 12th Field.