Selection process for Waterford quay

Waterford, Ireland’s second most important city, has developed historically strictly in relationship to its ports on the River Suir. This mercantile port, occupying an area of about ten acres extends along the river. This settlement has today become the center of a different transformation hypothesis.

The interaction between the disused port infrastructure with that of the actually actively existing namely the railway station and Rice Bridge, suggest the possibility of joining to this area an articulated system of new services and equipping the whole city with others of those including multi-story car-parks, a ferry station, a new pavement and a tourist port as well as an auditorium and congress center.

The fulcrum of the entire master plan for the North Quay are spaces of the Venue building, that is of the Auditorium, marina, and cruise line docking station and by the new bridge footpath connecting to the South Quay.

The project foresees the retrieval of the main pre-existing buildings used for storage, some of exceptional dimension. The project transforms the immense volume of the grain storage deposit into an innovative and complex building at the same time capable of carrying out that of a double role, that of an intermodal-interchange network and that of a solar energy center necessary for its functioning. The new infrastructure element hosts in its inside an automatic multi-story car-park, a cruise-ship station, a helicopter port as well as certain other accessories whilst the correctly positioned sides are flanked on the facing with photovoltaic monocrystalline accumulator panels. L’ETEB constitutes an important generative nucleus and exchange with the North Quay as a total transformation motor of the area.