NÍALL MCLAUGHLIN ARCHITECTS LECTURE, EXHIBITION AND BOOK LAUNCH AT THE RIBA
DECEMBER 2018
Níall McLaughlin has been invited by the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ben Derbyshire, to exhibit the practices work from this year’s Venice Biennale at the RIBA building in London which will be on display in the RIBA’s Florence Hall from 10th – 28th January 2019. Niall will give a lecture on the work on the evening of the 15th January. The lecture will be followed by an event in the Florence Hall to celebrate the installation and its contributors, and to launch Twelve Halls, the book accompanying the exhibition.
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.