Cox Power Architects won the award for Best Housing project for Kilmeena Village at the Irish Architecture Award.
Kilmeena village was constructed beside the existing church, school and sports ground in Kilmeena with Mayo County Council as client. There is a variety of house designs beside a new community centre with plans for a future childcare facility. To keep the new buildings in context with the surrounding countryside the layout of the village centre is based on a traditional clustered layout of grouped farm buildings known as a “clachán”. The informality of the clachán replaces the formal street planning of a typical town/village. Sheltered community spaces create incidental neighbourhood meeting points. A street line opposite the existing church will guide any future expansion of the village should the need arise.
The scheme successfully creates a village centre at the centre of a dispersed settlement and has become a focal point for the community. The project is a good contemporary interpretation of a traditional Irish settlement. Houses are also traditional in form but are modern in detail. The community centre which is typically a bulky building type has been successfully re-modelled and sited to reduce its impact on nearby houses and other neighbouring buildings. Landscape elements have been successfully detailed to provide screening, shelter, visual interest and enclosure. The scale and form of the buildings is unobtrusive in this rural setting.
One novel aspect of the finished project was the construction of a managed wetland using a Willow Plantation. This produced an exceptionally high quality of outflow from the buildings protecting the landscape and environment around the village. The willow crop is fertilised by the nutrients contained in the organic waste and is then harvested for wood fuel energy.
The jury commented that: “The challenge of sustainable rural development is successfully addressed in this thoughtful nucleus of houses and associated facilities. The balance of site strategy and formal language is deceptively simple but yields significant environmental and architectural rewards in this fully-realised piece of place-making.”
