Our thesis begins and ends with an encounter of strangeness. This is due both to the immediate circumstances of the authors who engaged with this thesis through the isolation and strange time field of lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic as well as wider encounters with landscape on the island territory. It is this apparent absurdity, this feeling of nausea which this thesis attempts to synthesise architecturally and spatially, in order to challenge the limits of design as a generator of meaning and purpose.

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This thesis is informed by an interplay between both theoretical readings and personal encounters with phenomena on site. Struck with feelings of ‘absurdity’ in both the personal and landscape field, the authors strove to understand such feelings through the works of theorists such as Albert Camus, Perez Gomez, Samuel Beckett and other ‘absurdist’ and existentialist writers. This has resulted in a simultaneous transcription of site through both the lens of the material and economic as well as the immaterial, the myth, the narrative.

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It is this juxtaposition which forms the core of this study. Within the context of contemporary Ireland, the Aran Islands are identified as facing issues and pressures that are both typical and atypical of islands along the western edge of Ireland. While both the national government and wider European government have attempted to solve these problems, they are limited to the frameworks set out by their respective bureaucratic systems. This results in a reduction of problems to one solely of the material and economy. Instead, this thesis has opted for a far more radical approach; one that engages with this problem through the creation of a new island mythos.

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This mythos - part absurdist reality, part radical performance - is synthesised through a new Absurdist architecture. Each individual element of the proposal (programmatic, form, making etc.) becomes an embodiment of this new mythos. The thesis strives to create an approach to design in which there is no separation between idea and built form.