(The proposed Giant's Causeway Visitors' Center. Image courtesy of Heneghan Peng Architects.)

To extend our pavilion festival briefly for another day, here some images of the new visitor center for the Giant's Causeway, the famous rock formation and popular tourist destination on the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland. Designed by Heneghan Peng Architects and built to replace the original center which burned down in 2000, it had its grand opening last week.


(The finished center. Image courtesy of Heneghan Peng Architects.)

The usual suspects will no doubt be smitten by its green roof, which helps to seamlessly blend the building into its surroundings. Indeed, the center seems to have just been slipped under a “fold,” incised and lifted slightly off the ground. It's a landform building.

In the words of the architects, “There is no longer a building and landscape but building becomes landscape and the landscape itself remains spectacular and iconic.”


(“Utilising the large difference in level across the site, two folds are created in the landscape. One, extending the line of the ridge, accommodates the building. The second, extending the level of the road, screens the car park from view.” Image courtesy of Heneghan Peng Architects.)


(“The two folds create strong lines in the landscaping, drawing all the man-made interventions together and organising the disparate requirements of the Visitorsʼ Centre into a singular intervention in the landscape.” Image courtesy of Heneghan Peng Architects.)

Here's another view of the façade. It has such a gorgeous rhythm to it, a horizon-bound movement that flings visitors out into the cliffsides, farmlands and coastlines. Evoking the towering pillars of the causeway, it also gives this newly reconfigured landscape a nice inner rhyming scheme.


(Image courtesy of Heneghan Peng Architects.)


(Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Source.)