ARCH-IVE INTERVIEW
JUNE 2020
On Tuesday 23rd June at 19.00, Arch-ive will be speaking to Níall McLaughlin about the literature that has influenced his practice, as part of the Architecture Foundation’s ‘100 Day Studio’.
Arch-ive is an online platform that investigates the books that have been influential to leading practitioners. It aims to showcase architects’ relationship to books and the way they utilise, interrogate, and display architectural resources.
The ‘live’ interview will take a slightly different format, focusing on specific buildings completed by Níall McLaughlin and the literature that surrounded their investigation. The discussion will focus initially on the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin and Níall McLaughlin Architect’s work at the 2016 Venice Biennale, ‘Losing Myself’. Secondly, the conversation will focus on three projects from Níall’s early career, ‘The Shack’, ‘Phototropic’, and ‘Wandsworth House’. Finally, we will discuss ‘Bishop Edward King Chapel’ in Oxford.
BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018
JUNE 2018
The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.
Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.
The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.