Location: Dublin City and Letterfrack Furniture College

Each Assembly concerns a singular theme, around which the lectures, workshops and activities are focused. The location of the Assembly plays a major part in how successfully the theme can be implemented.
EASA_Ireland will be bi-locational, with participants arriving in Dublin and travelling across the country to Letterfrack, where the majority of the workshops will take place. This solution is intended to provoke a degree of synthesis between the locations and the theme of {Adaptation}.

{Dublin} is the epicentre of the boom: without experiencing it, much of the suburban and rural development that has taken place over the last decade makes little sense. With the city growing at an exponential rate - both in terms of population and its sprawl - it provides a very real glimpse of the problems facing urban growth in Ireland.

The journey across the country becomes, in effect, a {Section Through Ireland}. Levels of development will be observable, from the urban centre, through nodal points at the canals to established suburban villages, new suburban estates, dormitory towns and onwards to rural villages and communities until arriving in one of the westernmost of these communities, Letterfrack.

{Letterfrack} is vital to our examination of the rural condition, as it provides a successful example of self-sufficient rural regeneration. The efforts of Connemara West, dating back a quarter of a century, to keep life and employment in a village suffering the disastrous effects of Ireland’s under-performing economy and losing the majority of its youth to emigration provide an inspiring and thought-provoking backgound to the theme. That the organisation took an existing building in the midst of their community and used it as the engine for change is exemplary in terms of both sustainability and ingenuity.

The resulting Furniture College by O’Donnell Tuomey is renowned throughout Europe as one of Irish architecture’s most inspiring works, a rural campus that resonates with the bruised memories of the former workhouse and bleeds into the surrounding heather against the backdrop of Diamond Hill.