Building Ireland's First Water Park: Inside Cork's Marina Park

That's the headline.

But behind it lies a question every landscape designer eventually has to answer.

How do you give shape to 32 hectares of formerly derelict, formerly disconnected ground? For Patrick McCabe, the answer was to go back to the old maps of the river itself.

Creating a new, maybe a new relationship with water because, um, a lot of the relationship that Ireland has had with water has been one very positive in the past.

That's how we've developed trade, how towns have become well-connected and so forth, uh, for, for tra- for trade in particular.

Uh, but in, in more recent times, uh, w- water has not been seen as a friend in Ireland.

It's been seen more as an inconvenience, and, um, concrete walls have gone up around it, and we, we prefer to maybe just forget about it, and sometimes we're even afraid of it, um, particularly if the rivers are a bit smaller and they're easier to, to keep out of mind.

Okay.

Yeah, it is interesting obviously, and especially so because the project itself does draw on some of the older wetland character that was there.

Approaching that, Patrick, was it a, a challenge not to slip into some kind of a nostalgia?

Not really.

I think, um, for me at least, I'm not particularly nostalgic now about landscapes in general.

Um, it's, it's a, it's a very disrupted landscape in a way.

It's been kinda cut off from, from the Lee, but at the same time, it had, if you look back into the maps and how it generated, you can see a, a beautiful sort of sinuous movement of the river, of all these different tributaries, uh, and also along the escarpment, along the Monaghan Road, and that became, if you like, a signature for the park.

So this fluid movement of these lines running parallel to the river in terms of the path structure and the water structure.

So I, I would say that's something that, that we embraced as a design team, and, uh, I worked together as well with Ochre Landscape Architects, it's good to say that, and a whole team of, you know, engineers and all different kinds of experts.

Th- this kind of movement of the river was very important as a signature, uh, for the park, and it's also a very practical thing, uh, because, you know, water flows in very clever ways, and we had to flow around the, the Páirc Uí Chaoimh, a great big stadium, which was ex- expanded, um, significantly during the project at the beginning.

So we had to find our way.

Uh, it was almost cut off, in fact, into three different parks, you know.

So we had to then ensure that that movement continued around the stadium and through the stadium area.

So, um, sometimes nature delivers form, which is very practical and very-

So apart from the challenges of working your way, you know, around Páirc Uí Chaoimh-

Yeah

... you were just really going with the flow of what nature had sort of, like, put there as a, an imprint at the beginning really.

Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, uh, embracing sort of sometimes the heritage aspects are really, is the key, for me at least as a designer, so that you can take things from the past and move them into the future and create that connection.