RIBA FORUM POETRY AND ARCHITECTURE
MAY 2015
On the 26th of May Niall joined architect Will Alsop, and poets Katharine Kilalea and Matthew Gregory at the RIBA for a discussion on whether poetry and architecture can together reveal something new about our contemporary experience of space. How do the two art forms inform each other, and what can poetry and architecture and their intersection tell us about modern habits and habitation? The event was curated by Catherine Hamilton from the arts association Store. Niall’s piece ‘My Portfolio in Poems’ looked at particular poems that directly influenced his projects.
‘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.