The new Carmelite Chapel for the Discalced Friars in Clarendon Street, Dublin is now complete. The Chapel forms part of St. Teresa’s Church and Priory and uses a pared-back post-and-beam framework to create a space which is conducive to prayer, song and private contemplation. The series of cross-laminated timber frames are turned at right angles to enclose the four sides of the space and form a woven structural lattice.
Niall McLaughlin has been invited to participate in a conference on Milson Island on the Hawkesbury River in Australia. Organised by the Architecture Foundation Australia, the residential event gathers an international field of speakers to explore a chosen theme. It will take place between the 28th and 30th of March 2014. This year’s theme will be ‘trace de la main’, taken from the comment by engineer Peter Rice that “whereas a Gothic cathedral will express the real and physical presence of the stone from which it was made, and of the masons who laboured over its construction so many years ago, very few modern buildings carry the same physical presence of the materials of which they were built. In short, ‘the trace de la main’, the evidence of those who built it, is not there.”