“Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.
The project is in illustrious company. The tradition of making dirty functional structures into objects of pride and beauty gave the world such things as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the noble, deco-ish ventilation towers of the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool and the Wirral. When Joseph Bazalgette installed London’s sewage system in the 1860s and 70s, he created parks and gardens and well-appointed public spaces on the river embankments that contain giant sewers, and ornate structures such as the neo-Byzantine pumping station in Abbey Mills, east London. The Arklow project, argues Clancy, is an opportunity to make visible the billions that are usually spent unseen on the public good of clean water.
Arklow (pop 13,399) has until recently dumped its untreated waste straight into the River Avoca, just before it flows into the sea. Beaches were unusable, the smell bad. The town, which like many in Ireland faces pressures of population growth, could not expand, for fear of worsening the already dire situation. Something obviously had to be done, but it has taken more than 30 years since the first attempt to build a suitable treatment plant there for it to come into being.
Eventually, Uisce Éireann, the state-owned company formed in 2013 to manage Ireland’s water, took it on and chose a site that would result in the least possible energy use and carbon impact. It was also what might be called a prime location, on a spit of land between the sea and the river, close to the harbour, with lovely views all around. If Arklow, released from the restrictions of its waste problem, were to grow, this would be the obvious place for a new neighbourhood.
So there was an issue of architecture as well as engineering, and a practice was sought who could civilise this mucky mechanical beast. Clancy Moore, until then best known for clever, playful, subtle private houses, with absolutely no experience of work of this scale or type, were not an obvious choice. But, according to Clancy, they offered a “conversation” with the many experts and contractors performing the essential task of making the plant work, rather than telling them what to do. There were, under the overall leadership of Arup and Ayesa, engineers for structure, for fluid dynamics, for ecology, even for odour. Rather than moan about the impact of technical demands on the aesthetics of a design, Clancy says, the idea was to use them as a spur to new thinking. “We tend to never disagree with an imposition,” he says, “but to let them into the heart of the project.”
The result is not a case of designing, as he puts it, a cosmetic “wrapper” on the plant, but of collaboratively rethinking the whole assembly. You may be familiar with the conventional sewage farm, with rows of round tanks in a field, where fluid is pumped from one to another in the multistage process of purification. Here the idea was to stack them on several levels, with one big pump taking the waste to the start and highest point of the process, from where gravity would take it through the rest of its journey to cleanliness, until a 900 metre-long outfall pipe takes it out to sea.
This layout means that the plant occupies less land than a conventional farm, such that some of it can be turned to other uses, including rewilding with gorse and pines. The tanks and pipes can be concealed from view. There’s also some freedom in the way the different parts can be arrayed: Clancy Moore chose to distribute them in two blocks set at an angle to each other, which helps to break down their mass and sit more comfortably in the landscape.
Inside there’s a multilevel world of tubes and cylinders and gantries and slow-moving mechanisms, an earthy version of an old movie’s vision of the future, amazingly unsmelly (those odour engineers having done their job), with a sea breeze wafting through. There’s a seeing-how-things-work fascination to the place, as in cutaway drawings of machines in a children’s book. Two windows, one looking on to nearby hills and one to the sea, will give views of existing and planned windfarms, situating the plant in a larger landscape of enlightened infrastructure. It’s a three-dimensional educational opportunity, of which school trips will take advantage.
The exterior is almost all a matter of long sloping louvers – designed to smooth the flow of air through the buildings – made of corrugated fibre cement board. It’s a workaday material given a bit of zing by its zigzagging profile at the corners and by that minty colour, derived from the colours of local boats, from the strip of some of Arklow’s sports teams, and from a sea thistle on the nearby beaches. Pleasure is taken in the way things are put together, in the fixings that stop the boards blowing away, in the rough-textured concrete feet that take the steel frame to the ground. The third, smaller building, containing laboratories and offices, is a more refined and playful version of its big siblings, with pawky angles and fleeting resemblances to a human face.
The whole sits companionably in a harbourside terrain of containers and sheds, while also intimating the domestic scale of the hoped-for future development. Clancy says that the new facility could help Arklow go “from being a problem child to something to be proud of”. In practical terms, it allows the population to triple. But would you want to live next to it? With the sea and the view and the handsome not-smelly structures, why not.