“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.
