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The living room
When speaking against mono-functional public space, Jan Gehl, architect and urban design author, suggested that the private living room provided a successful example of a space that allows for an independent yet connected experience: “in the living room all members of the family can be occupied with various activities at the same time, but individual activities and people can also function together”.¹ Here Gehl’s metaphor captures part of the intuitive draw of public space, which can be considered more broadly in typologies such as public libraries and museums, where cognitive engagement oscillates between the individual mind and communal room.

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Through the example of an historical landscape in Glasgow and one in Dublin, this article proposes a new type of outdoor ‘living room’: the Victorian Garden Cemetery. Inspired by their origin, this piece contemporises these spaces by making the argument that through collaboration and creative intervention, these spaces can offer a multifunctional experience that brings together open greenery, cultural engagement, and socialisation.

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Garden oases
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of cities across the UK and Ireland boomed due to industrialisation. Consequently, deaths rose, and small burial grounds, often attached to modest churches, became overcrowded and unsanitary. The garden cemetery, an idea produced to cope with this rising demand, allowed dedicated burial landscapes to be built on the periphery of urban centres, providing a solution to concerns around air pollution and the inhumation of bodies, while offering spaces for recreation and peace segregated from growing working towns.

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Le Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris) opened for burials in 1804 and provided a blueprint for those that followed. Winding paths with picturesque backdrops of designed landscapes, and protruding monuments of architectural and artistic merit littered these new grounds. Beyond providing safer and healthier outdoor space, these gardens aimed to inspire contemplation and reflection. In 1843, John Claudius Loudon, the author of On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries, stated: “Churchyard and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the morals, the taste and, by their botanical richness, the intellect, but they also serve as historical records”. ²

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Glasgow Necropolis
Ideas behind the garden cemetery movement are potent in Glasgow Necropolis, the first of its kind in Scotland. Its 50,000 burials and 3,500 monuments sit upon a prominent hill, north-east of the city’s cathedral. Victorian families with financial wealth could afford plots and the commissioning of tombs, gravestones, and memorial monuments were often used to reflect social status. Consequently, the necropolis is today an open-air exhibition of architectural follies reflecting examples of Classicism, the Gothic, the Romanesque, and Renaissance styles. The site is currently maintained by the charity Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, who graciously volunteer to preserve the grounds and share knowledge to visitors through guided tours and publications. The grounds are otherwise used predominantly as a thoroughfare and for general park activities.

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Strolling through the winding pathways, surrounded by greenery and pockets of architectural and social history, provides a similar experience to other cultural typologies. Yet, historical assets like the necropolis have potential to be elevated and provide more diversity among people’s choice of public urban space; to inwardly reflect and respectfully socialise in outdoor recreation. Instead of remaining as a static remnant of Glasgow’s past, a layer of contemporary intervention would reinvigorate the necropolis to encourage this, which can be achieved through forms of artistic collaboration.

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Goldenbridge Cemetery
Located in Dublin, Goldenbridge Cemetery was, like the necropolis, inspired by Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Established in 1828 by Daniel O’ Connell, Irish political leader and activist, it was Ireland’s first non-denominational burial grounds since the century Reformation. Though just  acres, it is anchored by a large neo-classical mortuary chapel, surrounded by mature yew, oak and cypress trees. Despite its small scale, local initiatives have innovated the cemetery’s use, pushing it to provide a more multifunctional experience for the public.

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Common Ground, a community arts organisation, moved into the cemetery’s lodge in 2016, and now use the building as workspace and to house artist studios. The organisation offers artist residencies where creatives are invited to respond to the cemetery and local area. Other community groups and artists now activate the burial space through creative intervention, welcoming introspective socialisation into the grounds where the public can perambulate individually and engage in the work collectively. For example, in 2020, the mortuary chapel was used as the stage for two musicians in the making of a film, by the Family Resource Centre, to raise awareness around violence against women. In the same year, artist Kate O’Shea exhibited a print installation of her collaborative work that called attention to spatial injustice in relation to gentrification.

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Goldenbridge’s creative engagement offers a precedent for cemeteries across Ireland and the United Kingdom. By developing a programme of considered, artistic interventions to unused garden cemeteries, an outdoor multifunctional experience of Jan Gehl’s living room would be available to the public; a space where people can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.

Crafting public spaces that respond to local climatic conditions demands careful consideration. The ground plane bears the brunt of numerous responsibilities: foot traffic, accessibility, servicing and managing fluctuating climatic conditions – specifically rainwater.  

Met Éireann's preliminary data for 2024 shows that March’s rainfall surpassed long-term averages [1]. Further climate change research conducted by Met Éireann also reveals significant increases in heavy precipitation events, particularly during winter and autumn months, with a projected rise in extended dry periods [2]. This poses challenges for both water scarcity and abundance, necessitating prompt design solutions and adaptations to our public spaces and wider built environment.

Rainwater in cities isn't just an inconvenience, it holds potential. Rather than condemning rainwater into stormwater drains, through careful planning and management techniques there are ways we can redirect and collect it, enhancing the spatial experience and climate resilience of our public realm.

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Hardly working

The surface of the pedestrianised core in Galway city over the years has succumbed to the inherent complexities of climate and water, with rainfall historically and consistently being a challenge. It averages at 2,800mm per year, in comparison to Dublin with an average of 680mm per year [3].

Since its pedestrianisation in the late 1990s, the street has undergone various phases of maintenance, resurfacing, and redesign. Previously paved with a cobble lock paving, this surface quickly deteriorated after years of heavy foot and vehicular traffic, compounded by poor drainage, and was removed in 2019.

Since then, it has been temporarily resurfaced with tarmac, and in many ways, is symbolic of the widespread soil sealing occurring across Irish towns and cities. This practice, along with the selection of visually unattractive drainage systems permeating the built environment, reflects a gradual erosion of the importance of aesthetic value in pedestrianised zones. These drainage systems are engineered to direct polluted runoff towards natural watercourses, such as rivers and streams, or in some cases to designated stormwater management facilities. Consequently, the resultant waste has been described as a "toxic cocktail of pollutants’’ identified by the EPA (Environment Protection Agency) [4].

The material surface of Shop Street in Galway city is currently under review as part of a broader public realm redevelopment and city enhancement strategy [5]. The strategy, while ambitious and impressive in terms of its quality of urban place making and accessibility standards, is conservatively reliant on impervious hard surfaces with traditional methods of surface rainfall drainage. The strategy, apart from its introduction of small areas of sustainable drainage systems (SUDS), misses a massive opportunity to effectively integrate and creatively link rainfall drainage from streets to new and existing public spaces, a critical characteristic of nature-based solutions (NBS) to urban run-off and climate resilience. 

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Working hard

The streets and sidewalks encircling Benthemplein in Rotterdam serve as its water veins, creating a living rainwater laboratory, a ground-breaking urban space known as the Water Square. Designed by De Urbanisten, and completed in 2013, it serves as a multifunctional public space that dynamically integrates water management with recreational and social amenities.The project aimed to address the city's challenges with urban flooding and water management. It not only successfully achieved this, but also exposed these challenges to the public through conscious and clever design [6].

Three basins gather rainwater: two shallow ones collect water whenever it rains nearby, while a deeper basin accumulates water during periods of sustained rainfall. Rainwater from the square flows via stainless steel drainage channels into the basins, visually mimicking natural waterways, while in dry weather, the space is accessible to all [7].

Here, linking the drainage channels to a large public space creates visual interest and dynamic interactions with water, enhancing the sensory experience of the square. The sound of water flowing through the channels contributes to the space’s ambiance, creating a playful, inviting atmosphere that attracts people to linger and engage.

The incorporation of street drainage into the design of the Water Square at Benthemplein exemplifies the seamless integration of water management infrastructure with urban design principles. By combining functionality with aesthetics, these channels contribute to the square's resilience, sustainability, and appeal as a vibrant public space in Rotterdam.

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Conclusion

Despite notable differences in context and scale, the Dutch model offers insights and an attitude to climate adaptive design that can be applied to the Irish urban environment. Fundamentally, the Water Square at Benthemplein demonstrates that it is plausible to effectively manage and even embrace heavy rainfall within urban areas.

It is important to recognise Shop Street in Galway not just as an isolated segment of the city's fabric, but as an integral component of interconnected systems within the broader urban water landscape. This perspective acknowledges the wider context and interdependencies within the urban environment, encompassing flood prevention, the preservation of biodiversity, water quality maintenance, and ecosystem wellbeing. This calls for a change in how we perceive and handle our conventional drainage systems, prompting a fundamental question: are we designing what's right for our rain?

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While Cork city is often likened to Venice for its comparable canal system beneath its main streets, its architectural and urban characteristics draw parallels to another Italian city: Naples. Like Cork, Naples is a port city with a rich architectural history stemming from the mediaeval and industrial periods, however, their architectural characters and urbanist developments diverge significantly. 

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The city of Naples embodies Venturi’s ideas, through its honky-tonk architecture, with various contrasting epochs stitched together into one elevational run. Structure, facade, stairs, fenestration: all elements become urban characters of a centuries-old play known to the locals as La Città (The City). This eclectic approach to urbanism results from the continual layering up of architecture upon architecture, fragments upon fragment, all with a keen desire to preserve, protect, and most importantly, maintain each architectural style. 

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Cork city has an opportunity to draw inspiration from the Neapolitan character by investigating its development through the lens of Venturi's theories presented in his text, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. By juxtaposing similar examples from both cities, a connection between Neapolitan theatrics and Cork city’s architectural and urban framework can be discerned.

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City gates

Monumental gateways of former entry points are present in both cities. Portas are embedded into the Neapolitan urban environment, creating porous penetrations into the city’s historic centre. Traversing beneath these oversized portals is a colloquial experience. While most of these city gates have been demolished or disappeared over the centuries, fragments of their existence are scattered throughout the city. Four of the most intact examples are Port'Alba, Porta San Gennaro, Porta Nolana, and Porta Capuana. Nolana and Capuana are former entry points of the Aragonese fortification walls, flanked by two towers on either side. Both are embedded into the surrounding urban fabric, with housing blocks capturing portions of the former fortifications. This variegated facade, which conjoins the massive scale of the Aragonese arch and the human-sized domestic architecture into one elevation, embodies what Venturi refers to as ‘superadjacency’.

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Looking at Cork city, similar giants appear, however, they take on an alien appearance compared to their surroundings. This is the case for the gateway that serves as the entrance to Bishop Lucey Park, known to Corkonians as the People’s Park. The double-arched entrance is reconstructed from the 1850’s Cork Cornmarket, a former marketplace, not located on the park’s derelict site, but instead at Coal Quay less than 500m away. Flanked by low stone walls and metal railings, recent development plans for the park include the removal of these adjacent structures while allowing the gateway to remain. The threshold becomes monumental rather than transitional. This form of symbolic architecture, represented as fragments of the whole, can be understood as “economical because it implies richness and meaning beyond itself” without the need for the whole [1]. However, care for its continuing existence in the chosen context is key. The gateway to the park rescripts its history into a fraudulent one, a contradiction, but not necessarily the form which Venturi discusses. Approaching by means of inversion, removing the deceptive, and creating a void to signify this entry adheres to the Venturi's idea of fragmentation while remaining faithful to Cork's history.

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Urban ecclesiastics

Venturi's theories are not lost on Cork city. It is in the ecclesiastical spaces where these theories are effectively realised. This effectiveness may stem from the proximity of neighbouring buildings, resulting in a densely complex and interconnected urban fabric reminiscent of Neapolitan city development. One example is St Augustine’s Church on Washington Street. The second of its kind on the site, this church designed by architect Dominic O’Connor and completed in 1943, embeds itself into the streetscape, matching street lines and eave heights [2]. Contradictions appear in its material usage and elongated stained glass windows. The scale of the chiselled stone facade compared to the adjacent brickwork follows a height ratio of 3:1 and 5:1 and a width ratio of 2:1. Glazed openings extend to the fourth-storey height with no external breaks. The entry point on Washington Street is marked by a Hiberno-Romanesque style archway, double the height of its central door and those surrounding it. 

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Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo in Naples follows a similar over-scaling of architectural features with a more theatrical approach. Typical fenestration proportions are kept, while the scale is magnified to an almost caricature-like quality. Duality is present in its glazed elements; becoming what Venturi describes as “as both structural and ornamental, frequently redundant, and sometimes vestigial” [3]. 

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By allowing these structures to play both against and with their architectural context, each element becomes a character in the city’s shared theatrical stage. This extreme multiplicity “reads like a unity through a tendency of the parts to change scale, and to be perceived as an overall pattern or texture”, creating an architecturally theatrical city that seeks to celebrate and conserve its elaborate and paradoxical history [4].