< Back to News

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA OPENING

MAY 2016


The collaborative project between Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Niall McLaughlin ‘Losing Myself’ opened on the 27th May for the Irish pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.  An opening speech was given by the Irish Ambassador for Italy Bobby McDonagh.

The project is a reflection on the lessons learned through a decade of designing buildings for people with dementia. It has two complementary components: a website that collates a mosaic of conversations, drawings, stories and experiments around the subject of dementia; and an immersive installation that tries to envisage a building we designed for people with dementia through their own experiences. The installation questions the notion of the building as a singular conception, and by extension, those architectural representations that insist upon buildings as finite and whole objects.

Please see below for a list of articles on Losing Myself

DesignBoom
Dezeen
ArchDaily
Divisare
Il Sole 24 Ore
giornale dell’architectura

‘ETERNAL PROBLEMS’, RIBA JOURNAL EXHIBITION REVIEW BY NIALL MCLAUGHLIN

JUNE 2014

Niall McLaughlin has written a piece for the RIBA Journal on the symbolic use of architecture within early Renaissance Art. The essay describes observations based on a visit to the ‘Building the Picture’ exhibition, currently on show at the National Gallery in London. The exhibition gathers together architectonic works by the Italian masters of the 14th-16th centuries that explore real and imagined architectural space.

The article observes how the Renaissance artists’ enthusiasms for displaying their newly discovered skills of perspective and knowledge of the classical forms are conflated with a religious symbolism. The tropes of classical architecture are used as visual metaphors for the divine and eternal. The article explores the effect of these spaces on the viewer and the reasons why the idealised architecture tends to alienate rather than engage.