Installation of Sky Garden into park set to begin

The installation of Diarmuid Gavin’s Sky Garden into a Cork City park is finally due to begin next month.

Cork City Council confirmed yesterday that work will begin around mid-July as part of a major restoration and upgrade of Fitzgerald Park on the Mardyke.

The news emerged over the weekend as the first phase of the Mardyke Garden’s Project was unveiled.

The Father Mathew fountain, which was built around 1902 as part of the Cork International Exhibition staged in what is now Fitzgerald Park, has been completely refurbished and is now ready to be used as a fully functioning water fountain — acting as a centrepiece for the revamped park.

The fountain, a protected structure, as well as the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, are the only two surviving structures from the exhibition.

It was originally set among pathways between the temporary structures built for the exhibition, but was later renamed Father Mathew Fountain and relocated to the centre of the park’s ornamental pond.

It was made from a mixture of concrete materials, and built using different construction types from precast to cast in-situ. Some concrete panels on the second basin were added later, as was a cast-iron section at the top.

The concrete was in poor condition and needed a serious conservation programme to repair and reinstate it as a working centrepiece for the upgraded gardens.

Carrig Conservation drew up a plan that included cleaning the structure, carrying out repairs to the failed areas in the concrete basins, repairing cracks, replacing lost decorative panels, relining the basins to make them water-tight, refurbishing the cast-iron section, and providing a new system to allow the structure operate as a functioning fountain.

The works were carried out by Queenstown Restoration Ltd in Cobh under the supervision of Cork City Council and a design team for the Mardyke Gardens Project, led by Cunnane Stratton Reynolds.

The fountain has been cleaned and failed concrete to the lower two concrete basins removed, and replaced in a mix to match the historic concrete.

The Chelsea Flower Show gold medal-winning Sky Garden designed by Gavin will be installed in the park on a site near the River Lee, with its signature flying pod on stilts.