Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant

The Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant is Ireland’s first architect-led project of its kind. Developed through collaboration with engineers and the local community, it provides a sustainable solution to long-standing water pollution. Built above ground to avoid disturbing contaminated soil, the compact, vertically organized facility uses gravity and solar energy to minimize its environmental footprint. Its louvred façades ventilate, control odours, and foster biodiversity. Designed to grow with Arklow, it acts as both civic landmark and ecological infrastructure, setting a model for sustainable design in Ireland.

This site contains a strong memory of industry and employment in the town, and it was proposed that the plant might represent a new piece of civic infrastructure. The design that emerged in conversation between the people of the town, its history, form, ecology and environment was a radical reinvention of a typical water treatment plant. The result is civic infrastructure, a building that speaks of the public good. The design is innovative in how it configures itself to reduce energy use, enable adjacent ecologies and embody local narratives and memories, and allowing it to present a far lower construction and operational use of carbon than any contemporary equivalents. Its completion now allows for a sustainable development of the town alongside clean waters (river and sea). It sets an optimistic future for Arklow, and the potential for Irelands urban and infrastructural development to deliver public good alongside care, excellence and innovation.

The primary building material of the buildings is the walls of the tanks, all formed of reinforced concrete. Decorative elements are elaborated from this vernacular to make feet from which steel portal frames rise to hold the rest of the structure. This site contains a strong memory of industry and employment in the town, and it was proposed that the plant might represent a new piece of civic infrastructure. The design is innovative in how it configures itself to reduce energy use, enable adjacent ecologies and embody local narratives and memories. The facades of the primary processing structures are made in Ondapress 57 by Swisspearl - in a custom run which allowed front and back to be coated with the same unique colour - chosen for the way it rhymed with the cultural and physical context of the site. The smaller laboratory building that marks the entrance is made in the same colour panel, also by Swisspearl, but from their Carat range of flat panels.