Clik here to view.
The Composition of Contrasts
According to Adrian Forty, ‘form’ is a concept that has outlived its usefulness.1 However, for many, the first thing noticed about a building is its form, in so far as form means shape. Design choices...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Memory Boxes
‘Cities are in reality great camps of the living and the dead where many elements remain like signals, symbols, cautions.’1 Everywhere in Ireland, from the scale of a city to a townland, holds...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Investigating the link between architecture and the social sciences
Jan Gehl observed that people tended to sit along the edges of spaces, with their back protected and with an unobstructed view of the adjacent space. There are many potential benefits that may be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fire Door / Keep Shut
Apartment Living in Dublin has come a long way since the problematic experiences of large-scale tenements and social housing flat complexes. But with a legacy of low quality housing stock and many of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Could evolutionary psychology be applicable to architectural design?
Then and now: children’s innate preferences for nooks and crannies that offer refuge remains unchanged. An important tenet of evolutionary psychology is that, while upbringing and genetic differences...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Built Environment and Mental Health
Henrietta Street- Two different mental influences side-by-side. One of the first connections between the built environment and physical health was made more than 2,600 years ago, in Hippocrates’ work...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ephemeral Artefacts
Temporary Architecture comes in many forms, from flexible built projects to the integration of architectural concepts within a wide variety of ancillary fields. Since the turn of the millennium, Irish...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Confused Meaning – Utopia/Eutopia
Map of Utopia, woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica In 1516, Sir Thomas More’s book, Utopia, was published. The phrase ‘utopia’, which More coined, comes from two Greek...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Modern Vintage – The Illusion of Authenticity
Bar – Established 2011 Nostalgia: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. From Greek ‘nostos’ meaning ‘to return safely home’, and ‘algos’ meaning ‘pain, grief, distress’....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Self-Specified Definition of a (Building) Ruin
A ruin is a physical accumulation of material in the form of a building/complex/site, or a part thereof, that was once assembled in (presumably) a purposeful way and is now decaying, or has grown...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Architecture and Becoming a Nation in Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art
Some time ago, while having a conversation with a friend on Dublin’s O’Connell Street the topic turned to how our Georgian buildings were torn down in the 1960s, and how this was due, in part, to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Between Fantasy and Reality – the Queen’s University end-of-year show
Image credit: Declan Davis It’s the most wonderful time of the year – the end-of-year shows; where war-weary, bleary eyed students are able to dust themselves down, dress themselves up, indulge in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Transcending the Greyscale – IAF Initiative Springboards Colour into Stanhope...
The Canteen Project at Stanhope Street Secondary School, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, by architect Evelyn D’Arcy. Photograph: Evelyn D’Arcy. In April 2013 the Irish Architecture Foundation launched the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gentrification and the Self-Destruction of Diversity
Image: G. Perry, 2015, Playing to the gallery: helping contemporary art in its struggle to be understood, Penguin Publishing Group, London. Self-Destruction of Diversity The term ‘self-destruction of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Estate of the Art – Collage and the Smithsons’ Golden Lane Estate
Collage, more than any other medium, is reflective of both the content and the context of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1953 Golden Lane Estate competition entry, and perhaps most importantly possesses...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The line between nature and urbanity
The relationship between humankind and the natural environment has always been a cyclical one: we carpet over landscapes with buildings only for nature to determinedly reverse these efforts. Caught up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Essence of Static
The presence of certain buildings has something secret about it. They seem simply to be there. We do not pay any special attention to them. And yet it is virtually impossible to imagine the place...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Review – This Must Be The Place (We’ve Waited Years to Love)
By chance, just before visiting the UCD MArch exhibition I read the November 1974 issue of the Architectural Review ‘A Future for Dublin’, with it’s Townscape in Action proposals for Dublin. The theme...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sharing the Landscape
‘Every architectural move is set in a landscape strategy. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World are a strategy of reason, for example. Norman England was constructed as a network of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Abhaile Project
In March of last year the ESRI published its report, Housing and Ireland’s Older Population, which investigated if ‘the housing shortage in Ireland could be alleviated by incentivising residential...
View Article
