An interpretive centre without controversy is a like an Irish summer without rain. At the Cliffs of Moher, it took fifteen years and €31m for Clare County Council to get the project from design to grand opening.
One thing everyone agreed on is that what was there before was not working. “Sustainability,” says architect Michael Regan of Reddy O’Riordan Staehli, “was a key plank of what we were trying to do. You only have to have a knowledge of what the site looked like before. It was a couple of tumbledown stone stable buildings with ad hoc Portakabins added on for toilets. There was a septic tank that wasn’t functioning and was spewing out all over the place and it was surrounded by surface carpark. Basically, when you came up from Liscannor, it was scarring the landscape.” More importantly, the site itself had become hazardous. Eroded walkways, subsidence and inadequate safety measures had made it very difficult to police effectively. “What has been going on over recent years was absolutely crazy.” Says project leader Ger Dollard of Clare County Council. “It was frightening what was happening.”
There are eight kilometres of cliffs, but every year, in excess of 900,000 people choose to visit one 200m stretch. The dangerous mess that this situation engendered has been replaced with 500m of widened walkways, viewing platforms and low impact safety measures. The visitor centre itself is a non-building. The tumbledown stone buildings were pulled down, the hill against which they had sheltered taken out, a visitor centre inserted and the hill replaced. Bearing in mind that regardless of what is erected, almost a million people will turn up here every year, it is difficult to conceive of a more low-impact means of containing them. Moreover, the site boasts a range of energy saving innovations. Solar panels take care of most of the hot water needs. A geothermal system looks after both heating and cooling. An onsite wastewater treatment plant facilitates large-scale grey water recycling while a high-spec building management system allows energy requirements to be closely monitored and managed.
The building itself is a subterranean, self-supporting concrete structure set into the hill so that the external envelope closely mirrors the contours of the surrounding topography. The entrance foyer, with its low ceilings, dim lighting and spare interior evokes a cave-like atmosphere. Liscannor stone underfoot bears the familiar worm-trails, a motif that pervades the entire design. Supporting columns, suggestive of stalactites, are imprinted with this signature, as is the textured ceiling both here in the foyer and in the central dome. “We sourced and approved the creation of a mould on the basis of a 2.5m by 2.5m Liscannor slab that we sourced in one of the local quarries.” Michael Regan explains. “That then became a template for the imprint. Because the building is non symmetrical, we wanted a non geometric pattern, so the worm-trails of Liscannor slab did that for us. It’s very forgiving because you can lay it in different directions…Where there were imperfections in it, we left them there because that’s part of the quality, and it does give a cave-like effect.” Shopping, rest and restaurant areas, in open plan, filter from the foyer, while a narrow understated passage brings you towards the central exhibition space in the dome. That understatement is central to the dramatic impact of the dome as you enter. The formwork was built in polystyrene and arrived in individually numbered sections onsite, Michael Regan explains. “It was basically propped up on platforms, then it was put in place and tied together, then the liner with the imprint of the Liscannor had to be dressed over the top if it in a series of overlapped sheets. The concrete was then poured in over that.”
The centre was built into the hills, with a grass roof constructed using seeds from the land
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