17A – House for a Glassblower
The project brief was to rework an existing building and site in the cultural quarter of Sligo Town Centre, to repurpose for an Artist in Residence, a place for living and working and public engagement. This residence is designed with the client’s work as central to the concept. The client’s are glassblowers from Northern Ireland. Their works involve intricate and delicately designed glass cups and baubles that often have filigrana spiralling around them. The concept of the design is based on the manufacturing process of these works, the way glass is expanded as it spins in the blast furnace.
The floor plates expand the higher one traverses through the building. The basement level is the public space and shop, with the workshop where the glassblowing process takes place. The street level is semi-private, and consists of small walkways that serve purely as access, with stairs serving as the vertical connectors to the public and private spaces. The stairs connecting to the private dwelling spaces spiral to an additional intermediate level, which conceptually relates to the filigrana that the artists are known for. This dwelling is on two levels. The first level contains the bedrooms and bathrooms, and the level above serves as the living and kitchen spaces, completely open to the upper shell of the building and connecting to a balcony on the exterior. The upper floors are connected on the south and east walls, but do not touch the north and west, allowing triple and quadruple height spaces to be achieved in the workspace.
