Donnelly Mirrors, a subsidiary of US car parts supplier Magna International opened its factory in Naas in 1968. Here the company manufactured mirrors and windows for automobiles all over the world. Due to intense competition, high costs and falling sales the company closed in 2007 with the loss of 525 jobs when it moved much of its production to North America and Spain.
As it stands currently, the factory is a space in-between, a room half-stripped of its furniture, and its properties disintegrating as time passes on. No longer the thriving employer in the locality, but neither a fully blank space either. It becomes an unsettling space to absorb and comprehend.
What happens to such a space when its employees, are no longer needed there? What qualities does that in-between space, that crossover place of abandoned factory floors of the industrial landscape, take on? Does the process of the abandonment of industrial architecture also erase the memories of it employees and life within these walls or are they possibly intimately wedded to the space that is being left behind? And can a deeper understanding of the space left behind rather than the living space, also inform our understanding of the creation of architecture, or, in this case, the creation of a potential anti-architecture?
