ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY
MAY 2023
The exhibition Architecture and Poetry is on display at Hay Castle from May 26th - 3rd September. The exhibition begins on the Castle exterior with a newly commissioned light poem from poet-sculptor Robert Montgomery and culminates in Pelé Cox’s verse inscription for Eric Parry’s Building 7 at Chelsea Barracks as well as the words of bilingual poet Gwyneth Lewis for the Wales Millennium Centre at Cardiff. Alongside this, the exhibition details three architectural designs by our practice which were inspired by poems, including the International Rugby Experience at Limerick which has its origins in the poem Beowulf. These architectural exhibits are complemented by a collection of concrete poetry from the 1960s to the present including The Mouse’s Tale by Lewis Carrol. To visit the Hay Castle website click here.
Níall will be giving a lecture at Hay Castle on the 30th May talking about the links between poems and some of our projects. Please click here to find out further details.
AIAUK 2021 DESIGN AWARDS WINNER
JUNE 2021
Magdalene College Library has won in the Professional Practice Medium Sized Projects category at this year’s AIAUK Design Awards. For over 20 years, The American Institute of Architects UK Chapter Excellence in Design Awards programme has proven highly valued by architects as they confer trans-Atlantic recognition for design excellence. Professional entries are sought from UK-based architects or designers, for projects anywhere in the world, and Architects or designers based outside the UK for projects completed in the UK.
Acknowledging that architecture is a corpus of inherited ideas, Alternative Histories invited more than 80 contemporary practices in the UK and Europe to imagine an exchange with architects from the past. Each office was assigned a different drawing from the collection of Drawing Matter. The architects were then tasked with making a model that not only responded to what they saw, but envisioned an alternative future for the original drawing while adhering to the constraints of the project.