This project was the result of an architectural competition to celebrate 150 years since the birth of the poet W.B. Yeats and explore themes in his most famous poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

This architectural response sought to explore the physical form of Yeats’ unattained fantasy of escaping urban life, not by expressing the cabin of ‘clay and wattles made’, but rather its negative form. A large clean-lined box, which holds this negative space, would be positioned in shallow water close to the shore of Lough Gill, providing a performance and exhibition space where music, plays and the spoken word could be enjoyed from the shore on summer evenings above the gentle sound of the ‘lake water lapping.’