Dublin School of Architecture Yearbook 2010-2011

Dublin School of A rchitecture DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

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2010 / 2011 Dublin School of Architecture Department of Architecture and Urban Design

Head Editors: Brian Jordan Shane Morgan Editors: Donnchadha Gallagher Simon Harrington Niall Howard Paul Kelly Paul Maher Assistant Copy Editor: Madeleine Kuhns Contact: Dublin School of Architecture Dublin Institute of Technology Bolton Street Dublin 1, Ireland Tel: +353 1 4023690 ww.dublinschoolofarchitecture.com www.dit.ie/architecture/urban-design/ Typeface: Arial Paper: Premium, Matte100#, 148 GSM Cover Image: Patrick O’Connor, Permanence Printer: Blurb Publishing ISBN: 978-0-9568502-3-2 Acknowledgements: Shane Morgan - Editor I would like to thank members of the faculty for their support and help, specifically Paul Kelly for his guidance and encouragement.

A sincere thank you to all the students for all their design work, photographs, and written works. A special thanks to Breffni Greene for his significant photographic contribution depicting the 5th years’ work.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the editorial group for the consistent hard work and dedication in making this publication a reality. © Dublin School of Architecture Press. All rights reserved. All information presented in this publication is deemed to be the copyright of the creator or the Dublin School of Architecture, unless stated otherwise.

Table of Contents: Contents Intro Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Extra Curricular

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Introduction: School Ethos

The Dublin School of Architecture, founded more than 70 years ago has its origins in the skills and trades associated with construction. The education in Architecture and Architectural Technology has been orientated towards producing graduates who will be involved in the design and making of buildings through their respective professions.

Through the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee and its earlier links with the Royal Dublin Society, which date back as far as the early 1730s, the Dublin School of Architecture has always been conscious of the fact that the Architects of today are the successors of the Master Masons of old.

The fact that the School delivers programmes in both architecture and architectural technology reinforces this position, affirms its origins and clearly aligns with the profession of the Architect and the Architectural Technologist. It is conscious of the space between Education and the Profession, and regards the shaping and understanding of this space as one of its important tasks and adopted positions.

In more recent times, particularly since the foundation of The Dublin Institute of Technology in 1992, there has been an increased emphasis on academic rigour, intellectual thought processes and the philosophies and theories that underpin the design process. The Dublin School of Architecture has developed its thinking and its approach to education so that it may function within a matrix of influences.

It has been designed and developed to produce well-rounded graduates capable of combining philosophical theory and concept intellectualisation with technical excellence. The programmes have been structured to ensure that these graduates are capable of engaging immediately with the

architectural and technological issues they will encounter on taking up employment, and to enable them to immediately contribute to their responsibilities as professional Architects and professional Architectural Technologists.

This involves a vast spectrum of skills and disciplines that form the educational experience.

It is well understood that the range of topics, disciplines and areas of expertise that graduates of the School of Architecture need to know greatly exceeds the teaching capacity of any School in the time period associated with this educational process. The School, therefore, aspires to teach its students how to learn so that they can continue the lifelong learning process after they have graduated and continue to develop without the support of the School or the Academic Institution.

The success of this type of education can be measured by the ability of the graduate to continue their education after graduation because they have been taught how to engage in and contribute to this learning process. The graduate is therefore sustainable.

The ethos of the School, however, goes much further. The academic education is delivered in an environment which promotes responsibility, tempered by social, political and economic awareness, where students and staff are expected to engage in projects which are often of immediate relevance to both local and wider communities.

These projects require an intellectual approach, coupled with a sense of pragmatism and realism and can only be realised through a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the issues involved. The poetic sits alongside the pragmatic.

The reality sits alongside the vision.

James F Horan

The importance of ethics is paramount. Ensuring an understanding of responsibility towards the planet, towards the Nation, towards the local society, towards their peers and towards those who will become their future clients is central to that ethic.

The hallmark of the School is one of enthusiasm and commitment. It is present in both the staff and the students. The positive outlook that stems from this can be sensed and felt in the corridors and the studios. This enthusiasm is contagious and it thrives even in these difficult times.

The School is acutely aware of the challenges and difficulties that must be faced in times where resources have diminished and will continue to diminish. The resources of the planet are finite.

Therefore, the sustainability of the buildings and the impact of building on the environment forms

a central part of the student’s education. The resources of the Nation are severely stretched and challenged, and the resources still available to continue to provide high level education have long been under threat. With a positive outlook, these obstacles need not necessarily be seen as totally negative but more as challenges for the future.

The creativity of the staff and student body of the Dublin School of Architecture can be brought to bear on the present problems and those that have yet to be encountered.

Since its foundation, The Dublin School of Architecture has been engaged in continuous change. That change has been driven by both described visions and response to challenges. I am confident that the School will continue this type of creative response, and to grow and flourish into the years ahead.

Prof. James F HORAN DipArch FRIAI RIBA MIDI ARB Head of School, The Dublin School of Architecture

Brian Ward 1st Year Studio Tutor

Object and Landscape. The first year course explores architecture in the rural Irish landscape. While the first six weeks operate as a primer, introducing the student to the basic skills and ideas needed for architectural exploration, the projects for the rest of the year are situated in the landscape. Emphasis is placed on supporting the students’ personal explorations in the field, but the fact that architecture is ultimately the design of experiences is stressed through this particular set of projects. These design projects are structured around a progression from a piece of furniture designed to hold a body in space, to a small shelter which can accommodate the body’s necessary functions of cooking, eating, resting and washing to, finally, a house and shed in which a family will live and work. The direct relationship of both plan and section to the space being designed is a central concern of the year, and modelmaking is used as a vehicle through which this relationship becomes apparent. Models also lend themselves to the study of light tracking through a room, a study which offers the student a tangible introduction to the sometimes ineffable notion of architectural space. Models are therefore given equal status to drawings as design tools and are requested periodically over the course of each project.

This year the bulk of the projects was set on Sherkin Island in West Cork in response to a request by its residents for an examination of the issue of waste on the island. The bounded nature of island life focuses attention on everything which is brought on and off the island.

At the moment, all waste has to be shipped at a cost to the mainland for disposal (either in Ireland or, more likely, abroad). The islanders were exploring the possibility that if recyclable materials were to be processed locally, they could be later sold at a profit. Materials, seen a short time ago solely as waste, are now perceived as a resource; a problem is re-imagined as an opportunity. These hard times, leavened only perhaps by visions of a more sustainable future, demand such thinking - simultaneously local and global. Hoping to take advantage of the focus on sustainability offered by island life, two study trips were conducted to Sherkin, the first in conjunction with the Architectural Technicians. This was in preparation for the design of a shelter at the end of Semester I. The students were asked to design a shelter for a marine biologist at the water’s edge on remote sites around the island. The shelter was to have one door, one window and one roof-light and particular attention was to be paid to dawn and dusk when the biologist would be leaving and entering the single room structure.

In the second semester the students were asked to design a small house and shed for a family which was moving to Sherkin in order to live sustainably off a natural resource which the island offered. The family house component of the project challenged the students to design a space in which individuals would require spaces for both solitary and communal activities, while the shed component allowed a study of the interaction between structure and space.

The second trip to Sherkin allowed analysis to be done of the coastal sites adjacent to the island’s main thoroughfare on which the projects were to be situated. Having seen the sites, a model-based study of exemplary modern houses introduced the students to the design of dwellings. In addition, a trip to Porto at sketch design stage allowed a study of the way in which Alvaro Siza’s Matosinhos projects negotiated a similar territory between thoroughfare and sea.

Visiting such buildings also allowed the students to observe first hand architecture deploying light, shade and view in the creation of poetic experience - buildings in which distinctions between architecture and landscape become blurred.

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Adopt a House

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Patrick Flynn 2nd Year Studio Tutor

If first year is about coming to grips with form, concept, construction and expression, then second year should be about the process: about deepening your understanding of the craft of architecture. The primary themes are idea, concept and process. The year focuses on developing a deeper knowledge of all three. On completing first year, the students have an understanding of the importance and necessity of an architectural idea.

In second year, the move from idea to concept to process forms the core of the year.

CONCEPT AND PROCESS. Architecture is the manifestation of an idea formed from a number of encounters, Frampton discusses this interplay of three converging vectors: the topos, the typos and tectonic. Second year, through the structure of the year’s programme, attempts to have an exploration of all three, yet without an appropriate concept the manifestation is hollow.

The year builds on the introduction to the concept introduced in first year and works towards an understanding of process. By process ,it is meant an explorative process which allows you to understand the palette with which you are working and the craft you are working within.

ETHEREAL AND PHYSICAL. The ethereal involves how the project briefs are formulated and the architectural ambition we hold for them. The physical involves how the idea is manifested, how truth, beauty and delight are brought into the way things come together. Thus, the themes are tackled by the student via site analysis, research, making, graphic presentation, technology.

The methods by which the themes for the year are explored and summarised as follows: - teaching of site and contextual analysis - keeping a good sketch book - using graphic/model making techniques appropriate to all stages of design.

- developing research techniques and the presentation of that research in an appropriate format to others.

- integrating material science, structural understanding and technology with studio.

- combining both the ethereal and the physical in the studio programme.

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Brendan Spierin

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Declan Duffy

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Caisin Nic An Bheatha

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Laura Carroll

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Davina Moody

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Laura Carroll

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Dean Murphy

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Noel Brady / Ryan Kennihan 3rd Year Studio Tutor

The Year 3 Architectural Design Studio is focused on resolving the internal and external pressures in an Architectural work. The studio is firmly based in the urban environment and takes its lead from the existing fabric, whether in Ireland or abroad. The studio fosters an observation of the tectonic and material realities of place and time. Through various analytical and synthetic techniques these observances are moulded into a suitable contextual response.

The strength of the response is almost directly related to the strength of the environment that is the focus of the studio.

In the first semester the studio was grounded in the immediate fabric of the city in which the school is located, Dublin. In the mediating zone squeezed between the twin conduits: The Liffey and Luas from Hueston Station to the New Conference Centre is an area that contains evidence of the last 150 years of urban intervention. Concretised in this fabric are tectonic codes of volume, density, character, material, openness, verticality, horizontality, plot grain, access and use. Following an investigation to extrapolate these hidden rules student groups were asked to develop master plans for three specific conditions: infill, vacant brownfields and a replacement project. Within each of the four blocks a subdivision system derived from the plan brought forth individual work developed around a core of residential uses and a community related (non-residential) function. At various stages within the process the students were encouraged to develop their research and reflective faculties through a study of exemplary models whether in urban or housing design. This was further enhanced with student generated community projects of wide variety which built upon strong contextual links.

Together, each individual project re-informs the collective project and furthers the collective view of the city. In turn, this experience enables the student to build on top of this method their own approach to the responsibility of designing for the urban environment.

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Gottingen Model Study

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Lubeck Model Study

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Rathaus Model Study

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Paul Kelly 4th Year Studio Tutor

Building Conception to Completion. The Building Technology Structures (BTS) studio is intended to inspire students to consider their conceptual thinking in the context of the realisation of their Architecture. To determine the value of a theory of architecture one must measure the theoretical intention against the physical realisation. This presents the difficulty of trying to formulate a theory in advance of building. As undergraduates, students are challenged to approach their projects through critical theory and implementation. As with any pursuit, it is important to act; architecture demands a theory that develops over a period of time, and although a project can be a useful tool in this development, it ultimately denies the possibility of full assessment until the act of building has been undertaken. The ultimate challenge for a student is to convince.

All theory is dependent on action for validation, otherwise it simply remains in realm of a hypothesis. Each student must evolve a personal working method based on the range of interests that engage them. This personal working method will support the development of projects during the design stage and the ultimately inform the intentions associated with construction. Each project should be examined against the initial concept and at each stage decisions are examined in the context of the overall concept. In this context, criticism of a project can be measured against the initial intention. When the concept or thinking behind a building is challenged, then it is imperative that the project is robust and can be explained and —if necessary—defended. The strength of a student’s working method allows for a true, robust defence of the scheme. Just as the projects success can be measured against the concept so to can the validity of any criticism. A student’s work should stand up to scrutiny in the context which it is proposed.

The ultimate aim is for the clarity of the concept to be evident at a glance, possessing a formal quality that the viewer can understand. To this end, the choice of materials, their relationship and detailing, are critical. Any mis-judgement at concept development stage has critical consequences for the realisation of the project.

To achieve this clarity, the project should operate on the level of the abstract, the viewer responding to the building on an intuitive level. The viewer should immediately sense a determined level of control, an influence on all aspects of the design of the building. The subtle relationship between two panels of stone, for instance, can reinforce or deny an idea about folding, mass or skin. The proper resolution of these seemingly minor matters elevates a building to the level of architecture. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, we must pass from mere construction to architecture to achieve a high aim.

The process described above is an honest and unflinching approach to architecture. The work of this studio seeks to produce unique work, modes of composition and aesthetics are eschewed to follow the path of the development of each project. The outcome at the beginning of each design is unknown; the unexpected is welcomed.

Ethna Walls 4th Year Studio Tutor

Semester 2 advanced studio module (ADS) had a strong emphasis on the integration of environmental concerns into the design projects from conceptualisation to completion and the opportunities and interdependencies offered by this approach. There were two main studio projects, one starting from a Macro point of view dealing with the outside-in, the other dealing with micro scale, concentrating on the inside-out.

Project 1, “ Town 2011” explored the issue of small town settlements nationally, with a view to establishing a framework for expansion suitable to 21st century living. The project was part of a competition brief set by the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) for students and dealt with analysis of place, environment and community through medium scaled sustainable development. Two contrasting towns were chosen for this purpose: Kilcock, a recently expanded town, and Abbeyleix, a heritage town, which is due to expand.

Project 2 had a strong emphasis on “performance” with the design of a new Conservatory of Music for the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM). The brief was compiled with the aid of the RIAM, who acted as a client. The site chosen in historic Thomas Street at the junction of St. Catherine’s Lane offered a great opportunity to work in section due to the constraints offered by the site. This building type offered great opportunities to use the difficulties posed by acoustical and other environmental concerns by converting them into architectural opportunities, resulting in a very individualised design response.

Essay: Architecture and Illusion I. WHAT IS ILLUSION? The architect and artist have a choice to either avoid or utilise optical illusions. They can be entertaining, useful, deceiving, disastrous or even playful depending on your point of view. They play a monumental role in how we perceive the physical world and are used to play tricks on people. We all know of the endless optical illusions popping up all over the Internet, but they have the ability to excite and frustrate us with their impossibility. We have come to trust our eyesight so much, that when our eyes deceive us we become completely baffled.

the limitations of optical illusions and translating them into an architecture, I hope to acquire a sense of what illusion can do for architecture. Through studying the work and theory of Rem Koolhaas, I will try to discover ways in which illusionary tricks are played in Casa da Musica—intentional or otherwise— and if these spaces are successful or if they enhance the architectural experience.

The architecture of Ancient Greece shows a great knowledge of many geometrical optical illusions and the architects were able to carefully work out how to use their knowledge to correct perspective.1 Drawings can reveal many optical illusions to the architect when the principle of perspective is understood. The fact that architecture is viewed from many different angles means that many different optical illusions may appear and disappear, depending on the location of the spectator. This means that the same relations of lines, forms and brightness in the drawings will never truly translate into reality. Sometimes this causes a problem for the architect although it is true with every case. It does not matter if a window, for example, is drawn, detailed and built perfectly square. If the eye does not perceive it to be so, it may as well not be square. The eye is only happy when the ‘appearance’ is satisfactory and so the architect can take steps to counteract the optical illusion and please the eye. The extensive measures taken by the Greeks are excellent examples of how this can be achieved.1

I. OUR EYES AND SIGHT. Sight has always been considered by many humans to be the most valuable of our five senses. The ancient Greeks were the first to believe that sight and light were metaphors for knowledge, clear vision and, most importantly, truth. Plato regarded vision as humanity’s greatest gift and he insisted that ethical universals must be accessible to “the mind’s eye”.2 Vision dominates our existence and there is, in fact, a great imbalance in our sensory systems. We tend to rely too much on sight to place ourselves in the world. Without our sight we would be floating around in a vast dark space. This is why, through sight, architecture (as with all other art forms), concerns itself with humanity’s relationship with space and time and our sense of place. Architecture seeks to make sense of these concepts by relating the human form to the world, by creating boundaries to otherwise seemingly limited space. It is our sight that lets us recognise the fragility of human existence, how insignificant a role we play in the universe. The vast quantity of information that an eye can perceive in a millisecond far exceeds that of any other sense and it is through our eyes that we perceive and contemplate the world.3 This is why when our eyes deceive us in the form of optical tricks or other illusions we have the internal conflict of whether to believe our eyes or use our intellect, both of which we trust. It is a strange sensation that can result in random outbursts of laughter and gasps of disbelief.

Seeing is deceiving. As a general rule, we do not actually see things as they are or how they are related to each other. In actual fact, we do not perceive them correctly or, in other words, our conceptions and perceptions are not quite adequate. Only a part of what is perceived comes through the senses from the object and the remainder comes from within. It is the visual sense or the intellect that is responsible for optical illusions. It is our past experiences, desires, imaginings, and a whole host of other obscure influences that create visual illusions. The effects of illusions are disconcerting, although they have been practically perfected. The result is a sense that control and visual harmony have been lost. Cubism is the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one’s reading of a picture: a man made world, created and understood, a way of compensating for the fact that we cannot see around corners or see an object in its entirely at once.2 But the fact is, illusion is all around us and we encounter small tricks every day. We are not often aware of them, but, after all, the best optical illusions are cleverly concealed.

The organizational mechanisms of vision are best demonstrated by illusions. Illusions illustrate that perception is a creative construction that the brain makes in interpreting visual data ...Learning does not prevent us from being taken in by these illusions.1 Eric Kandel

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II. OBJECTIVES. The objective of this dissertation is to explore the place of illusion in architecture. The ancient Greeks, the first to utilise optical illusions, were more concerned with correcting perspective, using optical illusions to create harmony and ultimately please the eye. In modern times illusion is being used to the opposite effect, creating spaces that trick our eyes and contradict our rational thought. Science and technology3, as well as a perfected knowledge of perspective, has allowed architects to utilise and explore the concept of illusion. What is uncertain is the impact that it can make on the individual, the psychological effect, as well as the actual quality of the spaces. These are issues that need to be explored further in order to understand whether illusion has a place in modern architecture or not. Is it dishonest? What purpose does it serve? What is it like to inhabit illusionary spaces? Or is it even possible to inhabit illusionary spaces?

III. OVERVIEW OF DISSERTATION. Through gaining knowledge of how we perceive the world through our eyes, and understand

PERCEPTION AND SIGHT

I see a table. I walk around it. I see a doorway. I walk through it.

Sight is essentially a way of navigating us through life; it’s our most basic and elemental function. However vision is not a mere recording device that records what it sees and plays it back in the brain. It is not passive, but active; it explores its surroundings, picking and choosing what it wants to see. A camera will capture every single element of a frame but the eye will pick out the most attractive elements.4 This allows the brain to deal with the most important components and skim over the uninteresting parts.

II. KNOWING TO SEE. SEEING TO KNOW. Our eyes show us a world but not the world itself. Our eyes repeat what they see but it is we who perceive and acquire a representation of the world.

Some of what we see is reality and some is a reality altered by the imagination, completed or warped by our own thoughts, desires and dreams. It is our imagination and actual reality or fact that make up what a person perceives to be real. 4 Sight is known as a device for “recognition, prediction and conformation”.5 Architecture can use these attributes to create a balanced and harmonious experience—spaces where we feel at ease, relaxed and at home. Repetitiveness and familiarity are sometimes what people expect and prefer. We like to know what we are looking at and are often uneasy with the thought of the unknown or unfamiliar.5 This is maybe why some of our architecture has remained unchanged for centuries.

Despite having made major advances in technology, we are still recreating the architecture that our ancestors built. We are creatures of habit, creatures that see to know.

The Ancient Roman scholar Pliny wrote, “The mind is the real instrument of sight and observation, the eye acts as a sort of vessel receiving and transmitting the visible portion of the consciousness”.6 Thus we need to know to see, as much as we believe; we see to know. To perceive something we need to know something and this can mean simply being able to recognise what we are looking at. It involves our own knowledge and consciousness. This is why sight is unique to every individual.

We create our own perception – bring our own thoughts, wants, believes, needs and expectations into the equation.

Anna Pierce

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4 III. DISTORTION AND CORRECTION. What does distortion mean and what does it imply? Distortion occurs when an object presumed to be one way, for example, a square, gets twisted, bent or stretched. The fundamental thing about distortion is that there is always a comparison between what the object or space ‘is’ and what it ‘ought’ to be. This belief that something ought to be a certain way again goes back to what is learned.7 We learn that a staircase ought to be straight or that a floor ought to be flat. This derives the conclusion that these spaces are not in fact distorted but are only distorted compared to our previous experiences and expectations.6 The architect can manipulate these expectations and the learned knowledge of the participant to create unexpected experiences.

As much as sight it is a way to perceive three-dimensional objects, the spaces we see are only images that are projected on the retinas of the eyes by our lenses. They are as flat as a photograph. The retinal receptors transform light into nerve impulses and nothing more than that.

The eye wants to correct what is incorrect. In other words it wants to see what is simple rather than what is truthful. It will seek to see simplest the figure obtainable, although this may be the wrong figure. Architects can and have used this to their advantage for centuries. They can trick our eyes into believing that there is greater depth. The most obvious example of this is quite simply slanting walls, floors and ceiling to create a much deeper room.

A built example of this is the Palazzo Spada in Rome7. The architect Franceso Borromini wanted a deep architectural vista and from the outside looking in it appears this way. However, upon stepping inside there is a strong feeling of wooziness that is caused by lack of spatial orientation.8 It looks one way but is actually another. The same principal has been applied in reverse to maintain a regular shape such as Michelangelo’s Capitol Square.8 The buildings converge to obtain balance. Plato and Vitruvius were not impartial altering of the truth to obtain a more beautiful form.

For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in the measures and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder. 9 Vitruvius

ILLUSION AND ART I. THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST. The Arts have always been an outlet for expression, where artists and architects can explore their ideas and push boundaries. The relationship between artist and architect has always been intertwined. Throughout history they have been linked and only in the last hundred years or so have they gone their separate ways. This, in a way, has ironically allowed them to sit back and interpret each others work in ways they never could before. Art installations have become increasingly more popular and they are often heavily influenced by architecture. However, architects could learn a thing or two from the way that some artists can inject a sense of fun and excitement into their work. Although architecture cannot really be compared to art, architects have the tendency to play it a little too safe when it comes to designing innovative buildings (we always tend to be copying somebody else). Of course, architects have a greater responsibility in ensuring that their buildings stand the test of time. The artists’ installation after all, will be removed.

The Penrose Stairs, also known as the impossible stairs, was invented by Roger Penrose in 1985. Pensrose was greatly inspired by Escher, so much so that he wanted to create something impossible of his own. He discovered both the continuous stairs and the tri-bar structure.

II. THE LIMITATIONS OF ART. Many artists including M. C. Escher9, Bridget Riley10 and Salvador Dali11 use illusionary tricks in their work. In M. C. Escher’s famous painting Relativity12, the normal laws of gravity do not apply.10 The structure of the building does not make any sense; people are simultaneously walking upstairs on what appears to be different gravitational planes. The normal laws of physics do not apply. The most famous example of optical illusions of this kind is the Penrose Stairs.13 These stairs are impossible in three dimensions but the two dimensional drawing achieves this paradox by distorting perspective.11 Architecture cannot quite be expected to achieve such

2010-2011 parodies as they are quite simply impossible. However, this does not mean that perspective and light cannot be manipulated to a greater extent. The irony of the situation is that the drawings are so obviously architectural that if they could be transformed into reality, they would make us feel as though we were in some parallel universe where time stands still and gravity exists on different planes. Of course, this is an impossibility, but there are other ways in which buildings can be designed to give us small thrills and make us believe we belong to a world that is extraordinary. The artist Ames14 would eventually lead the way in creating architectural space that actually distorts space in the third dimension and Dali’s theories would come to influence the work of architect Rem Koolhaas.

TRANSLATING ILLUSION INTO THE THIRD DIMENSION I. BEHOLDERS SHARE. In the final chapter of Gombrich’s15 Art and Illusion, he poses the notion that Beholder’s Share is “the collection of perceptual and psychic acts through which the spectator brings an image into existence by perceiving and understanding it.”12 As mentioned earlier, the works of Escher and earlier artists such as Piranesi and Hogarth demonstrate this Beholder’s Share in that we have to try and work out the relationships between things and, in doing so, we realise it is a paradoxical scenario. The reality is that such a scenario cannot exist physically in the real world. Spaces are built out of planes and must have a beginning, an end, and they must join somewhere. This is why translating illusion into the third dimension is so difficult, if not impossible. Illusions are, after all, only tricks that work from a certain point of view. Illusionary tricks in Architecture tend not to completely fool the spectator only hint at an illusion. Ames was the first man who perfected illusions in the third dimension.

II. AMES ROOM. Science alone cannot truly deal with all the matters of perception. Psychology plays the most important role in investigating illusion. Albert Ames was the leading investigator in this area, who invented a number of trompe l’oeil16 that explained further how perspective images need us to interpret them to work.13 The Ames Room is the best-known example of how architecture can distort the world. In this clever room, through one specifically placed peephole, it looks perfectly average. From the outside or any other angle however it looks skewed and distorted. The laws of physics do not apply in this room. People appear to shrink and grow as they walk around the room, a face looking in the window appears large and in another small, balls can roll uphill and water poured from one container to another seems bizarrely displaced to the side. 4 The phenomenon is puzzling if you do not realise that the vision depends upon the projective pattern on the retina. The eye of course does not care about such indiscrepancies. If the deformed room is seen as rectangular, this needs no more and no less of an explanation than the fact that a physically rectangular room is seen how it is.

A key finding in Ames work is that even after we see what is actually reality (if we see the room from the ‘wrong’ angle and understand that it is not a right angled room) when we go back to looking through the peephole we cannot undeceive ourselves. It holds us even though we know that what we perceive is not what is true. In fact, it is practically impossible to see it as a skewed angled room. We cannot un-see the illusion.

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A similar scenario exists in another experiment by Ames where three configurations of a chair exist, only one of which looks how it appears. We literally cannot imagine these unlikely objects.

The mishmash of lines does not have a place in our world, no name, no familiarity. However, chairs we understand, they are familiar. We can place and comprehend them. The main point that Ames was trying to make is that ‘perceptions are not disclosures’.3 What we see through the peephole does not directly or immediately reveal to us what is there. It proves the fact that we cannot possibly know what is there, all we can do is guess. Our guess is of course influenced and, in a way, limited by our expectations. Gombrich raises the point that we see what

The Ames Room, built in 1935 by the artist and scientist Adelbert Ames is a room that appears to have right angles when viewed from a particular point but is now trapezoid in shape. For this reason people appear larger and smaller because they are actually in the distance.

we know, that an alien from outer space may see the mishmash of lines because a chair is not familiar to him. However, the creature would surely see the simplest possible configuration and besides, the likelihood of a crisscross of tangles ever coincidently looking like a cohesive and rational shape from one particular angle seems highly unlikely. So of course do the aliens.

Ames not only conducted experiments to better understand perspective but he also investigated scale and the notion that we are unable to tell what size something is unless we know its distance. This is possibly the best-known and most common form of visual ambiguity. We also cannot tell an objects size if there is not something relative to compare it to. The simple experiment Ames conducted involved placing abnormally large and small objects such as wristwatches and playing cards at differing distances. The spectators saw these objects as normal sized.

The obvious outcome is that people can be easily deceived but almost as importantly, people will hazard a guess even though the object could be literally any size.

ILLUSION AND ITS ROLE IN ARCHITECTURE? I. DELIVERING THE UNEXPECTED. This poses the questions: does illusion have a place in architecture? Should it deliver what is expected or purposely not deliver what is expected?

Venturi17 believes that it should not. He believes that by using conventional elements of architecture in an unconventional

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4 way, a new meaning is created. This can be applied to the use of illusionary tricks in architecture. “If he uses convention unconventionally, if he organises familiar things in an unfamiliar way, he is changing their contexts, and he can use the cliché to gain a fresh effect. Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar context become perceptually new as well as old.”14 Anticipation should not always be fulfilled, however, they should be unfulfilled in a meaningful way, to jolt us back to reality and make us question what is real and what we have just simply learned. Architecture can question convention in an extreme way. It does not only give different meaning to materials, form and elements, but can also completely distort our perception of reality.

II. ILLUSIONS IMPACT ON PSYCHES. Vidler18 looks at two types of warped space, the first being psychological space full of phobias and neuroses and the second being the way that artists are pushing the boundaries to create new space. Architecture can inflict discomfort and panic. The way an illusionary space moves and shifts is not static, but forever changing in unpredictable ways and is unnerving. Depending on our state of mind, this can create a feeling of seasickness or oppositely a surge of excitement. “The psychology of space was devoted to calibrating the endlessly shifting sensations and moods of a perceiving subject whose perception had less to do with what was objectively “there” than with what was projected as seen.”15 One’s state of mind has a huge influence on how architecture is experienced and perceived. The experience of the building will change from person to person, day to day depending even on mood. Architecture is no longer thought of as containers for people and activities but is considered a dynamic, ever changing entity referred to by Mitchell W. Schwarzer19 as the “emergence of architectural space”.16

ILLUSION AND ARCHITECTURE I. INFLUENCES. Rem Koolhaas20 has always been an observer of reality. He accepts the world, its contradictions and is utterly unsentimental about it. He favors the ugly, seeks to explore the messy social reality and certainly isn’t afraid to write about it.17 Illusionary spaces, whether intentional or not are part of Koolhaas’ work. This may be due to the fact that he is heavily influenced by Dali’s Paranoid Critical Method21, which he has adopted and attempted to translate into his architecture. How can we decipher between what is a random instinctive ‘for the hell of it’ architecture and what is actually intelligent rational theory? Without rationalism the spaces created are surely not as meaningful, however, Koolhaas feels that architecture has moved on from the need to rationalise every thought and decision. He believes a more instinctive approach in some instances is just as valid: I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.18 Rem Koolhaas Whether he has intentionally warped space to ensue chaos and another emotions or whether this is simply a by-product of his other methods remains to be seen. He claims to approach design by conceptual and physical design thinking and tends to throw away any preconceptions of what a building is expected to be. It does appear that Koolhaas is interested in breaking down architectural conventions and exploring a new way of building architecture. These challenge people’s preconceptions and make them rethink their built environment. However he may not intentionally inflict emotions through his architecture that make spectators feel, for example, joy, fear or confusion. This is a by product of the very abstract, conceptual spaces that he creates through integrating social issues, economic issues and even political issues into his architectural thoughts.

II. THE PARANOID CRITICAL METHOD. The Paranoid Critical

Method was created by Salvador Dali in the 1930 and was adopted by Koolhaas in his architecture. Put most simply, it is a way of systemising irrational thought and viewing the world in a different way. It his paintings, Dali’s landscapes melt across the page hallucinogenically. An extreme paranoid, he strived to denounce reality, creating instead these delusional images that dealt with optical illusions, splitting apart bodies and movement.

He sought to “systemise confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality.”19 The Stinking Ass22 is a manifesto by Dali that sheds crucial light on the Paranoid Critical method. Dali wants to intercept reality by imposing irrationality on the world and, in doing so, will be able to test rational and objective phenomena.

Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert it dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. The reality of the world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of the mind.20 Salvador Dali Dali points out some of the crucial elements involved in Paranoid Critical Method. To clarify, they are divided into four parts: 1. He uses words such as ‘swift’, ‘subtle’ and ‘refined’ to describe connections made by the paranoiac.

2. These connections are then systemised but not tied together.

3. Paranoia spreads, is contagious and difficult to resist.

4. Reality provides ‘illustration and proof’, that come in the form of everyday objects. 21 Paranoia to Dali is not about complete irrationality, although it may appear that way. Instead it is about how things are interpreted and the style in which they are interpreted. Although Dali used the Paranoid Critical Method to exploit visual deception, the full extent of the phenomenon was not fully explored. The resultants of all of Dali’s theories are simply a series of hallucinogenic images.

III. APPLICATION OF THE PARANOID CRITICAL METHOD TO THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT. Koolhaas is a pioneer for Paranoid Critical thinking but uses the method to form something altogether more realised. He concerns himself with similar themes, that of delusion and interpretation. Through his architecture he attempts to show the world in a different light or through fresh eyes.

Although the same themes come about the outcomes are quite different. Where Dali was attempting to confuse and distort what is real, Koolhaas is literally building a built yet ‘distorted’ reality.

This means that Koolhaas is in fact not distorting anything only building what we perceive to be distorted. In the end, you simply cannot distort reality.

Koolhaas uses the Paranoid Critical Method as an analytical tool. In Manhattan, where he believes that the skyscraper is a highly irrational building that separates its uses onto the same and separate floors. That these buildings could become a symbol of success and power lends itself to the theory that people have a warped perception of reality. These skyscrapers are a learned and expected structure and prototype in society. Koolhaas says that the developers in New York have “developed a schizophrenia that allows them simultaneously to derive energy and inspiration from Manhattan as an irrational fantasy, and to establish its unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rational steps”.

22 He discovered an irrational consciousness that no one had simply thought to think about before.

IV. BIGNESS. Koolhaas’ theory of Bigness, or the problem of large, began with a photograph by Bruce Bellas from 1966 of a man about to lift a prism of concrete. It was chosen to symbolise OMA’s tendency to create buildings of colossal size. The concept of Bigness is a “concept that absorbs that of architecture beyond the threshold of critical mass…to the point of overwhelming it”.23 Venturi refers to the “regime of complexity”, where the historical and cultural nature of a project can be overlooked in favour of the new found technologies and advancements in engineering that promote Bigness. A crucial consequence of Bigness is the disappearance of logic. In the scale of the city logical planning is replaced with ever accumulating Bigness, piled upon one common metropolitan plane.

2010-2011 If Bigness transforms architecture, its accumulation generates a new kind if city. […]. Bigness can exist anywhere on the plane. […]. Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it preempts the city; or better still, it is the city. […]. Bigness is the last bastion of architecture – a contradiction, a hyper-architecture”.24 Rem Koolhaas

CASE STUDY: Casa da Musica This building is insane. It is also brilliant.25 Hugh Pearman, The Sunday Times.

I. Y2K HOUSE. Casa da Musica started out as the Y2K23 house that was originally intended to be built in Rotterdam. The house began as box that transformed into a random polyhedral solid.

Koolhaas began with a series of models of a box and over time he added spaces that became increasingly protruding and grouped. At the time, Koolhaas said in an interview “[I] had an instinctive notion that it would be interesting to go back to something stupid and simple, and that the Dutch context in itself would be a provocative context to do that stupid thing”.26

beams that elongate and disappear seamlessly into the shadows and intrusive walls that close in around you. Piranesi, a master of perspective, paints a scene of a nightmarish dungeon. It conjures up images of improbable and terrifying scenery.

Is this a reflection on Casa da Musica? I don’t believe that the same emotions were intended to be conjured up by Koolhaas, however the space does leave one pondering similar questions.

In both cases we want to understand what we see and make sense of it all. The rope hanging from the pulley, where does it lead? How is the roof held up? What is the angle of the banister?

What is the angle of the wall? In Casa da Musica, the reality is that these obscure angles are, in fact, all very possible, if not probable. Koolhaas has managed to build a reality that recreates only what artists such as Piranesi could have dreamt of. The question is whether the spaces that Koolhaas has created, as impressive as they are, are spaces that people actually want to occupy. It comes back to the individual, these spaces may conjure up feeling of fear and anxiety but they may very well conjure up feelings of excitement and bewilderment. No matter what way you experience it, it remains an impressive and powerful space.

Initially, the inclined planes on the roof were to mimic the traditional image of a pitched roof. Here began signs that Koolhaas was adapting the expected and questioning the accepted. He continued to wrap the volumes attached to the original box in a “thick layer”.27 This created a plane where the roof and walls we indistinguishable. The spaces beneath the skin between the additive rooms and main living area were filled with functional programmes. The original box becomes invisible and appears to be puncturing the solid polyhedral mass, almost like a tunnel. The resulting house was a formless overall mass, its rooms shaped by the inclining geometry of the facades. These spaces take on a difference shape, contracting, shifting and contorting with only the tunnel remaining unchanged. Koolhaas achieved a house that had anti-gravitational qualities. It becomes another expression of the instability frequently sought after by Koolhaas.

II. A LEAP OF SCALE. The so called, “informal polyhedral solid”28 was to undertake a complete transformation when it underwent “gigantic enlargement”29 and became the Casa da Musica in Oporto, Portugal. The building was literally translated and enlarged into the new projects brief, keeping the spaces divided into two categories; “collective spaces” and “secondary living spaces”.30 On the drawings the collective spaces are shown in white and the secondary serving spaces in black. This gigantic leap of scale is not uncommon for Koolhaas who is infamous for building unashamedly enormous structures. He believes that the solid has to isolate itself, to become “an autonomous object” 31 to be observed like a sculpture, an enormous object. He put it simply – “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big”.32 He puts into practice his theories of Bigness. Composition, scale, proportion go out the window. In a world where such rules don’t apply, we are left with something unfamiliar and seemingly bizarre - a giant white polyhedral, sitting on a flat plane in the middle of a rundown area of Oporto. Up close its canted walls distort your sense of perspective and it is nearly impossible to get a sense of its dimensions. From a distance it looks like a landed spacecraft. It does not appear of this world.

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III. THE ROLE OF STRUCTURE IN ILLUSION. The structure of the building is not the determining factor in the organisation and layout of space. Koolhaas was careful to ensure that the form would remain the same regardless of size or apparent physical impossibilities. The additions of struts to support the finished building are seemingly as abstract as the building itself. Koolhaas did not want the structure to get in the way of the carving of the building. Whatever had to be done to facilitate the eventual form was done. The result is a space reminiscent of Piranesi’s24 set of etchings, The Prisons25. This comparison demonstrates the qualities of the architecture created by Koolhaas. Whether intentional or not, the space has a similar quality to the painting;

The entrance lobby is a space reminiscent of Piranesi’s set of etchings, The Prisons. This comparison demonstrates the qualities of the architecture created by Koolhaas. Whether intentional or not, the space has a similar quality to the painting; beams that elongate and disappear seamlessly into the shadows and intrusive walls that close in around you.

Piranesi, a master of perspective, paints a scene of a nightmarish dungeon.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4 All of the spaces are laid out without any recognisable geometric order. The result is the dizzying Piranesian scenario that Koolhaas seems to favour. The circulation, as you might expect, pervades the building, routes seemingly limitless and equally endless.

It is like stepping inside Alice in Wonderland: you never really know where you are and looking at a plan of the building doesn’t seem to help. Allow yourself to get lost in the building, either way that is what will happen. The glazing once again creates a surreal world. The double glazed panels, for acoustic purposes, are like giant sheets of corrugated glass, undulating to make wave like shapes. Ironically, they can also result in a feeling of seasickness. The world is perceived through this glass, enlarged to show “the city in a way that has never happened before”.34 The world outside moves, expanding and compressing, warped and distorted as you walk. The glass literally bends the light.

IV. “REMAINING SPACES” as Koolhaas refers to them, are actually the random left over spaces that are assigned different activities. Some of these activities seem absolutely pointless.

One room in particular (which I cannot make out in the plans or sections) appears to have no other use apart from ‘sliding’. There is a musical installation in this room, an afterthought no doubt, but the main entertainment comes in the form of plush orange velvet carpet on a slanted floor of about 30 degrees that allows you to slowly descend down it. In actual fact it is rather difficult to get up there in the first place. Such a space is a lot of fun, if only for a while.

The dimensions of the room are such that it plays tricks on the eye when viewed from certain angles, although it does not do this as perfectly as, for example, the Ames Room26. Even so the eye is so unused to these unconventional angles that we see people growing larger as they ascent. It, unlike the Ames Room, is contradictory in many ways. The Ames space is ‘correct’ from one angle only. The illusionary trick only works in a very particular place and even when looking through the peephole, the space is much more interesting viewed from the ‘wrong’ angle. With Ames you are either looking at it in the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way.

In Casa da Musica you are never looking at the spaces in the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way as such. The distinguishing factor is that Casa da Musica was never intended to be observed or ‘looked into’, but instead to be experienced, inhabited and enjoyed.

The geometry of the spaces and form destroy all hopes of unity and regularity, although the constructive geometries are exact.

These constructive geometries allow us to generate a realistic evaluation of what is before us. There is only a split second before our mind catches up with our eyes (or our eyes catch up with our mind, which comes first I can’t be sure)27, that the illusionary tricks are evident.

Why create such a space? The space was not so much created, as it just existed as left over space. All leftover spaces are of a similar scale and shape, not actually useful for anything, entertaining and yet uncomfortable to be in: a paradox, and a bit like the building as a whole. It is impossible to try and rationally critique this space or many others that Koolhaas has attempted to intellectualise; It is, after all, an accident and was never technically planned. The room is like an evolving and shifting space, caught in time in a concrete and velvet reality.

There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.

Rem Koolhaas V. SUCCESS OR FAILURE. I don’t think that it’s possible to say that Casa da Musica is a failure. It is easy to be critical. It is selfimportant, looks as though it should either topple over or hover off the ground and fly away, it is impossible to navigate, wastes space at every given opportunity - the list goes on. Everything about it is completely daft. Koolhaas is daft. Or brilliant. If you abandon “the compulsory need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit

that certain things are completely instinctive”. In this respect it is a triumph and an excellent example of how architecture and illusion can conjure up raw emotion and challenge our naturally inquisitive nature. The building is not one that you love to hate but the contrary, a building you hate to love. Its success may have something to do with its originality, its freshness and bizarreness.

How it would have worked as a house is questionable, the spaces are constricting and unstable, fun for a few hours but tedious and exhausting for any period longer than that. The illusionary tricks wear us out after in time. Our eyes are constantly battling with our mind. What we see is always contradicting itself and although we have the capability of applying known logic, our eyes don’t seem to care.

CONCLUSION Casa da Musica if proof that illusion in architecture has both its strengths and weaknesses. It can be used in many ways, from correcting perspective in Ancient Greece to distorting our perception in modern times. The way in which illusionary tricks affect our mind depends completely on how they are utilised.

They can make you feel uneasy and uncomfortable, make your head hurt and eyes sore or they can excite and thrill. They can also do all of these things at once. It also depends on the person and their mood. An advantage to using optical illusions in architecture is its ability to conjure different emotions in different people but also different emotions in just one person. It can be a powerful tool that has not been explored to its full potential by modern architects.

Of course, it has its disadvantages. The spaces that I looked at are practically unusable for any real purpose. They can be impractical and downright strange. Perhaps illusions could be used in a less obvious, more practical way but diluting the strangeness would surely defeat the purpose. And so illusion finds its rightful place in buildings such as Casa da Musica, where people participate in the quirky eccentricity and then retire home to their right angles homes. It can be used successfully, but even if it does invoke hysteria and chaos, at least it invokes something.

REFERENCES 1. http://www.visualillusion.net/Chap02/Page01.php 2. http://www.tagate.com/optical_illusion/greek_history.shtml 3. Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, cit. p.15. 2005 4. Matte Luckiesh, A Random Illusion, cit. Chapter 13. 1922 5. Richard Leppert, Art and the committed eye. The cultural functions of imagery. cit. p.5 6. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A psycology of the creative eye. cit. p.153 7. Ibid., cit. p157 8. http://www.artbabble.org/video/ngadc/empire-eye-magic-illusion-palazzo-spadascorridor-part-5 9. Vitruvius, Ten Books of Architecture, Book III, cit. p.83.

10. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A psycology of the creative eye. cit. p.153 11. Roger Penrose, Roger Penrose: Collected Works, Volume 6, cit. p.173 12. E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Chapter VIII, Part I, cit. p.204 13. Ibid., cit. p.210 14. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in architecture, p.43.

15. Schwarzer, The Emergence of Architectural Space, cit. p.48.

16. Ibid., p.57 17. Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas OMA -The Construction of Merveilles, Chapter 1.

18. http://www.quotesandpoem.com/quotes/showquotes/author/rem-koolhaas/134631 19. George E. Marcus¬¬, Paranoia within reason: a casebook on conspiracy as explanation‬. p.56 20. Salvador Dali, The Stinking Ass, , La Femme Visible, Editions Surrealististes, Paris, 1930.

21. George E. Marcus, Paranoia within reason: a casebook on conspiracy as explanation, Chapter 2, p.21.

22. Koolaas, Delirious in New York. cit. p92.

23. Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas OMA,- The Construction of Merveilles p. 227. 2008 24. Koolhaas, Bigness 25. Hugh Pearman, The Sunday Times, London, 10th April 2005.

26. Koolhaas, Transformations, on OMA@work.a+u. cit. p.107.

27. Ibid. cit. p.108 28. Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas OMA,- The Construction of Merveilles p. 277. 2008 29. Koolhaas, Delirious in New York. cit. p92.

30. Koolhaas-OMA, Casa da Musica. cit. p147.

31. Ibid. cit. p131.

32. Katrina Heron, From Bauhaus to Koolhaas. Wired Magazine. Issue 2.07 - July 1996 33. E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Chapter VIII, Part I, cit. p.207 34. Ibid. cit. p134.

35. http://www.quotesandpoem.com/quotes/showquotes/author/rem-koolhaas/134631

Essay: Rationalism Preface. The purpose of this essay is driven by self inquiry.

Through research, I had hoped to attain a greater knowledge of the rationalist tendency in architectural production. As a tendency that I am drawn towards, I am implored to better understand it. The issue at hand is not reinforce existing prejudice but to identify its many personas so that they may inform a creative process today. This essay notes my findings.

Rationalism A Brief Introduction.

Conventional wisdom dictates that there are two categories of mental activity, the scientific, depending on reason, and the artistic, depending on feeling or intuition. This simple dichotomy fails to consider, amongst many things, the role that the institution plays in scientific thought and the role that judgement forming intellect plays in artistic creation.

Of all of the arts, architecture is the least capable of excluding the idea of ‘rationality’. Utile and constructional criteria circumscribe, even if they do not determine, the field in which the imagination of the architect is said to work. Therefore, the degree to which an architecture can be said to be rational depends less on the presence or absence of these criteria and more on the importance attributed to them within the total process of architectural design and within the framework of governing ideologies. The idea of what is ‘rational’ within architecture has not remained constant. It is not a static concept. It has varied according to the constellation of ideas that have dominated particular historical phases. In this way, it cannot be considered a ‘style’ or an art-historical category.

To better understand rationalism as an architectural phenomenon it is necessary to make clear its definition philosophically. In western philosophy the primary distinction has been between rationalism and empiricism or between reason and experience.

While the opposition of reason and feeling is not synonymous with these categories, there is a relation between them. In both cases reason implies the intervention of law between the direct experience of the world and any praxis born out of it, such as architecture. It is this notion, that praxis is the result of the application of general rules governed by reason, that best provides a general understanding of rationalism in architecture.

In this instance, it is important to consider the notions of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. In the case where knowledge is held to be a priori, an empiricist understanding of the world is seen to be fortuitous or incidental. Whereas when knowledge is held to be a posteriori, a rationalist understanding of the world is seen to be subject to authority or habit. The history of architectural theory during the last two hundred years is predicated on the conflict between these two categories of knowledge.

A classical understanding of rationalism, for instance, dictates that the just form of activity is one that lives in closest accord with ‘natural law’. In this regard the ‘rationalist’ seeks to reveal ‘truth’. But if truth is received a priori or via the authority of doctrine, then the basis for empirical critique is set. It is in this light that the origins of rationality within architectural praxis must be considered.

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Rationalist theory in architecture saw its origin in the Cartesian philosophy first reflected upon in the artistic doctrines of the seventeenth century. Within these doctrines were enunciated principles that were originally found in the only surviving ancient treatise on the subject at that time, that of Vitruvius. At this time artistic understanding saw itself subsumed into theories derived from Aristotlean and Platonic positions. Thus was prescribed, that art was an imitation of nature and that the art of the ancients, having successfully achieved this, was also fit to be imitated.

Hence nature was chiefly approachable through the authority of the ancients.

One of the sources for this concept of imitation can be found in

Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève exterior, interior, section, vestibule, plan.

2010-2011

Robert Chapman Aristotle’s Physics. He says: If a house were one of the things provided by nature, it would be the same as it is now when produced by art. And if natural phenomena were produced not only by nature but also by art, they would in this case come into being through art in the same ways as they do in ature…In short art either completes the process that nature is unable to work out fully, or it imitates nature. ¹ The notion that an ancient treatise would hold authority over contemporary praxis is not unfamiliar, but it is perhaps counterintuitive, particularly within the context of modern sensibilities. In this regard, it is important to consider the ideological context of this conception of rationalism. The reassertion of classical authority, when set against the background of a gothic cultural hegemony that had dominated european cultural production since the fall of the Roman empire, perhaps provides an insight into its ontological justification. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to grasp as a theory of architectural knowledge, and herein lies its conceptual ambiguity.

Conversely, a utilitarian understanding of rationalism would seek justification through instrumental reason. In so doing the rationalist seeks to apply reason via organisational principles, to affect social, economic or mechanical parameters. Though this may mark a progression conceptually, it does not absolve itself from critique.

It was from eighteenth century onwards, with the rise of utilitarianism, that the alliance between classicism and what was ‘rational’ became increasingly tenuous. It was at this time that architecture saw itself split into its ‘scientific’ or constructive and ‘artistic’ or representational functions, with reason being reserved for the former and intuition for the latter. This new conceptual dualism was to seriously undermine the unitary doctrine of classicism. Here instrumental reason took precedent over metaphysics. Efficient causes replaced final causes.

There was now no theory that could withstand the growth of caprice and eclecticism, whereby classicism was reduced to a specific tradition whose use was customary and justified by convention. The ideological exigency was no longer to assert the cultural dominance outright and without question, as was seen in the Baroque era that preceded this period, but to distil the architectural repetoire using empirical experience as supplementary proof of the existence of natural law.

Though the conceptual split of architecture’s scientific and customary principles did theoretically undermine the ‘justification’ of ‘style’, a weakened form of classicism was to persist throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century through to the following century. It was in France that rationalism took on the logic of structure and utility, where, for some time, architects had sought to reconcile the ‘rational’ constructive principles of Gothic architecture with the customary importance of Classicism. Léonce Reynaud, a prominent classicist and proclaimed rationalist of the mid-nineteenth century, espoused a view that it was the task of the rationalist to consolidate Classical architecture with the modern sciences.² In so doing, one was expected to preserve and reinforce the features of classicism that had evolved to such a perfected state that they could not be disregarded. Echoes of this same belief can be seen as late as the twentieth century in the work of Le Corbusier, amongst others within the avant-garde.

An example of this consolidation can be seen in the Bibliothéque Sainte Geneviéve by Henri Labrouste. Led by architectural historians, most twentieth-century observers have claimed to see in Labrouste’s first building, the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve, a precursor to the reductive aesthetic and the beginnings of the rationalism that would help define twentieth century architectural modernism. Labrouste’s use of an exposed iron framework for the internal structure of the reading room and his equally rationalised system of differentiating the supporting from the supported members of its masonry façade have caused most historians to see in the building, a rejection of classical form and the premonition of has been called the engineers aesthetic.

This view is expressed by Sigfried Giedion, perhaps the foremost

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4 historian of architectural modernism.

Labrouste’s chief accomplishment in this building rests in the manner in which the iron construction is balanced in itself, so that it puts no stress on the walls. The achievement of just such a hovering equilibrium became the chief task of engineers in the second half of the nineteenth century.³ Though this is true, to preserve the buildings proto-modernist identity, Giedion omits any mention of the buildings decorative forms by which the structure of the library makes itself manifest as art, in a word, its clothing. This, perhaps a validation of what Manfredo Tafuri referred to as “operative criticism”. A reading of Labrouste’s first building requires a more nuanced inspection.

Meaningful expression was arguably the real issue facing the nineteenth century architect. The question of style was only a subset of that problem. With a seemingly endless variety of forms available and a hitherto unprecedented historical selfconsciousness, the question lay with how to ascribe meaning to architecture and to ensure its comprehension. For the Classical architect the limitations placed on what forms could be considered typical and appropriate circumscribed the content of those forms and ensured their signification. This was not the case for the early modern architect. Empirical understanding presented new challenges.

In light of this, Labrouste set out a course to reject many of the restrictions imposed by the then dominant ideology of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But opposed to the disregarding of all precedent, he sought to construct an ‘assemblage’ of sorts, drawing on many influences, and directing them towards a singular end.

Amsterdam Stock Exchange Interior Post Office Savings Building Interior Vienna

2010-2011 Since its completion, the Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve has been seen as an odd mixture of pretentious modernism clothed in retrogressively historical forms.

The inscribed inset of the panels of its facade resonate with the appearance of a late Egyptian temple. The dark, open space of its vestibule is like an Egyptian hypostyle hall with its ceiling raised above piers on impost blocks. The vestibule could also be compared to a Classical Greek Stoa, with the upper spaces between the piers of its side walls filled with illusionistic paintings of trees, forming a background for a procession of busts of famous authors, artists and scientists.

The reading room has a decidedly representational character.

It is girded round by a continuous arcade. Its piers are perpendicularly posed to the main volume of the space, which is delineated by a single spine of cast iron columns down its centre.

Given that Labrouste could have easily vaulted the entire space, his decision to divide the room in half with a central spine of columns suggests a predilection for the plan type represented by a Greek temple or a Gothic refectory. Labrouste fully intended that the use of these columns be directed towards a spatial end. In this way he made the idea of the parti central to the composition of the buildings main space and in so doing he gave the reading room a modulation that was utilitarian, symbolic and non-hierarchical in character.

German Trades Union School, Hannes Meyer

The building draws unashamedly from multiple reference points.

It is clear that the representational aspect of architecture was still attributed with great importance, but its reasoning was no longer metaphysical or unitary; rather, it was resolutely utilitarian.

Labrouste’s library could be seen as multi-faceted in its conceptual character. The pragmatic concerns over the use of cast iron do not override what is seen as an appropriate form(s), for a building of its nature. Meanwhile its ‘warped symbolism’, points to a desire to deal with realist imperatives, so pertinent with general artistic discourse at that time. One thing is certain, Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Saint Genevive marks a conscious re-evaluation of form and content in the light of a more selfconscious society.

A modernist understanding of rationalism again posits a different conception. Much more stringently based on structural utilitarianism, the modernist is said to employ a distilled architectural repetoire towards the optimisation of construction and needs based on ‘economy of use’. But in making this distinction it is necessary to consider the ideological and theoretical context from which this conception is born out of.

It is argued that it was not until the twentieth century that the seeds of positivism and structural rationalism, planted a century earlier, bore fruit. In the early 1900s , a consensus began to formulate, calling for severance with the past and the development of an architecture that draws its meaning from the objective conditions of technique and programme. Amongst the earliset practitioners of such a philisophical position were HP Berlage and Otto Wagner. Examples of their positions can be seen in two buildings of notable influence, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the Post Office Savings Building in Vienna. Both buildings display a reductive tendency now synonymous with modernism.

According to the English architectural critic Alan Colquhoun, the emergence of a refined rationalist architecture was the resultant of a synergy between three conceptual models that developed at this time, namely ‘Logical Atomism’, ‘Functionalism’ and ‘Formalism’.4 Each of these categories helped radically define 20th century rationalism, one that was alien in its appearance to that of its 19th century predecessor.

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Logical Atomism, a philosophical concept conceived by Bertrand Russell, postulated an ideal, empirically based language which would correspond to the structure of reality. Its premise proposed that the world consists of elementary entities possessing only elementary properties that were connected through elementary relations, thus our scientific world view must be composed analogically out of elementary propositions. The paradox of this view is that to satisfy an empirical truth, the world must be reduced to a set of formal components devoid of all immediacy of meaning. This elementarisation can be seen as an impoverishment of the meanings carried by cultural convention.

Such philosophical notions spread to architecture quickly. The

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4 take reference from Malcontenta, it is by no means slavish in its appraisal of it. In fact it is predicated on the subversion of many of its characteristics. Rowe points to this by contrasting the ‘plan paralysé’ in the Malcontenta to the ‘plan libre’in the villa at Garches. The complexities of section and the subtleties of elevation present in the vertically articulated Malcontenta, via its use of structural walls, are transposed to plan in Le Corbusier’s creation.

A further example of this conscious subversion can be seen by contrasting the role of the cruciform in the plan of the Malcontenta to the apparent lack of a similar layout at Garches. Where at the Malcontenta this central axis organises the succeeding spaces around it into a readable and harmonious whole, at Garches a more sequential or decentralised sensibility is employed. It is in Corbusier’s façade that we are said to get a clue to this. There are moments of apparent symmetry, but these are not directly relational to the spaces on the interior and are further offset by elements such as the ribbon window, which by stretching from end to end decentralize the façade and break down conventional symmetry.

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insistence on ‘use value’ in the work of Adolf Loos and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Stonborough house, links the idea of logical atomism with function.

The idea of functionalism is fundamental to the modern movement. The overriding idea that there is a casual relation between functions and forms within architecture is a notion that goes back to Vitruvius. This importance of function as the central generator of architectural form was capable of a highly conceptual interpretation, as seen in the works of Le Corbusier or as a ‘scientific’ interpretation based on a materialist understanding, as seen in the work of Hannes Meyer. In either case this idea of justification through function still resonates today.

It is possible to define formalism as a school of thought that stresses rule governed relationships, rather than relationships based on cause and effect. A formalist approach restricts the discussion of historical works of art by placing shared characteristics into formal categories whilst avoiding any deliberation on what these characteristics may mean in their historical context. From this, a universal theory may be extrapolated. The paradox central to this thesis is that while wishing to break with the rules of classical aesthetics, by establishing more general norms, formalism tended towards the establishment of ahistorical laws, laws that unwittingly resembled those of classical theory itself. In the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, this formalist approach is expressed in sometimes overt ‘classical’ tendencies.

Colin Rowe points us to this when discussing Le Corbusier’s Villa at Garches in conjunction with Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta.5 Rowe alludes to the importance of an ideal geometry, in the work of Le Corbusier by comparing the proportional systems of both villas.

In so doing he reveals a remarkable similarity in the distribution of their load bearing elements. Having said this, Rowe admits that in the Malcontenta geometry is diffused throughout the entire building, whilst at Garches it seems only to reside in the block as a whole and in the disposition of its supports.

It is important to note that although Le Corbusier’s villa does

The ideal geometry postulated at the Malcontenta is afforded by the unquestioned acceptance of a metaphysical idea, an idea that goes on to permeate the whole building. Given that such a theoretical notion broke down in the eighteenth century, becoming more a matter of individual sensibility, Corbusier could not occupy such an unassailable position. Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches points to a conscious attempt to dissolve and distort aspects of the classical repetoire, but for such a process to take place there must be an appropriation of these same values. In many ways Le Corbusier gives expression to the conflict between the two artistic traditions, the Cartesian a priori as expressed in the frame of the building and the empirical a posteriori as expressed through the independent arrangement of the houses volumes in accordance with practical needs. What is clear however, is that a distinct relationship is set up at Villa Garches, one that does not discard older more classical notions of rationalism completely but rather seeks to appropriate them within a modern context.

Within the modern movement we see a strong predilection for ideas of transparency and progress, ideas that existed in accordance with the positivist view of history that dominated the era. It is arguable however the degree to which these ideas were realised. The movement though pivotal in the historical development of contemporary architecture, eventually began to decline into a form of dogmatism that it had initially opposed.

Already in the 1930s there was set in motion a process of ‘liberalisation’. Second waves of modernism such as the New Brutalism, as well as more disparate notions of ‘neo-realism’ or ‘neo-empiricism’ began to propagate.

Conditions were set that would eventually give rise to a range of Postmodernist positions. In the mid-1960s, new architectural

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2010-2011 ideas emerged such as ‘neo-rationalism’, that sought to reclaim the representational components of rationalism that were said to have been lost in the modern movement. Architects like Giorgio Grassi and Aldo Rossi sought to bring a synthesis between the modern movements achievements and more classical elements in architecture. While the former emphasises the more ontological and tectonic aspects of the tradition, the latter stresses the subjective criticality that it can give rise to.

The beginnings of which can be seen in Rossi’s Galaratesse housing in Milan and are more comprehensively articulated in buildings such as Grassi’s university buildings at Cheiti, with their emphasis on typological clarity and simplicity.

As part of a more general ‘postmodern’ criticality, this type of rationalism can be seen as an attempt at renewing the tradition, having grown discontented with the seemingly defunct propositions put forward by conventional positivistic thought.

Their ‘success’ is questionable however, and their output is small and modest in scale.

Today the problem remains as to whether or not we can use the term ‘rationalism’ in architecture in the same way that it has always been used. It is clear that its meaning continues to change, and in this sense we are presented with difficulty when we are purported to allude to a supposedly universal reason. It would seem that the concept is defined, in its broadest sense, by an internal tension. The act of deciding on the undecidable.

In so doing the architect must navigate a quagmire of sorts, in deciphering the aspect of the architectural repetoire that must be discarded, retained or renewed. This in itself postulates a vanguard/rearguard position that places emphasis on subjective criticality.

Though this idea may seem insufficient, the idea of an exalted rationalism, as a method in which the subjective decision to produce a certain architectural composition leads to the definition of logical principles necessary for the transmission of that composition, seems to depose of any normative application of general rules. This notion may provide refuge in the future.

Though this is unsure.

What is certain is that rationalism as an architectural concept is not static, rather it is a tendency within the discipline.

Accumulatively it has embraced notions of progress as well as conservation. The attempt to provide an emblematic presence of that reason that was once supposed to permeate universe is perhaps now not as pertinent as before, but this does not quell the desire to provide a transmissible expression of ‘reality’ through architectural form. It is in this sense that it will live on.

Bibliography Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Rayner Banham. MIT Press.

The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts. Arthur Drexler. Secker & Warburg.

Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development. Manfredo Tafuri. MIT Press.

Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism. Alan Colquhoun. Black Dog Publishing.

The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, and Other Essays. Colin Rowe. MIT Press.

The Architecture of the City. Aldo Rossi. MIT Press.

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Luke Gleeson

PHYSICALITY BUILDING. This design used the context to become a node of activity and connection on a site previously defined by infrastructural barriers. The brief of a sports and physical activity building was chosen as the ideal brief, considering the possibilities of a site adjoining a public park. The building became the division between traditional recreational Mount Bernard park to the south east and the artificial landscape of pitches and running track to the north west.

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Spaces for sport and physical activity are predefined spaces with rigid requirements. I wanted to assemble them in a different way, to create novel and impressive spatial conditions. The structural approach was generated by stacking the spaces on top of one another. Changing rooms and spaces that require less height (and smaller spans) were grouped together to create bridges that span the larger spaces of the main hall and swimming pool.

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MT. BERNARD PARK. A New Linear Park connects the Fassaugh Road with the new Luas station at Broombridge.

Existing routes are maintained and new ones provide additional connections to and from a new community facility. The park is imagined as a series of planted strata that cover the existing feral landscape. Walkways and bike paths cut across the green areas and open up new vistas. The planting is in the form of additional trees, new reed beds for the existing canal, meadow

areas and wild berry hedges. A community building rises up from the park and reconnects the landscape back to the surrounding neighbourhoods. The brick mass is eroded to allow light to flood the interiors and open up different views of the landscape. The variety of functions allows different age groups and users to be involved in community activities. The building is envisaged as a place for people to meet collectively and exchange ideas while learning from one another.

Eoin Byrne

BROOMBRIDGE GLASS RECYCLING. This project looks at how an industrial process might inform an architectural exploration. This new building is a beacon for the more austere and pragmatic economic condition we are faced with. This new facility would engage the public on two levels, by opening its process out to the exterior, and by allowing people to visit and see the workings of the plant. This would encourage people to engage with the idea of waste management and the importance of its continued development. The site is essentially a green field site, therefore, this building uses as small a ecological footprint

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as possible. It engages with Dublin and taller buildings in the future, having accelerated the sprawl into its hinterlands by refusing to engage with high rise buildings. This will also give Broombrige a sense of identity and place within the city that it is currently lacking. The rest of the site is to be occupied by an integrated constructed wetland, that will be used to treat the waste water from the surrounding areas. There is currently one operating very successfully in the nearby Tolka Park, and the Dublin City Council wish to expand their use across the city as a means of treating storm water.

Niall Howard

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MT. BERNARD PARK BOTANICAL RESEARCH. This is intended to re-accomodate the existing post-graduate and PhD department of Trinity College Dublin. The facilities currently in Trinity are out of date and the test sites and greenhouses were mostly removed to make way for Trinity Hall’s development. The taxonomy department within botany is currently situated in the national botanical gardens, located ten minutes from this site.

The remaining eco-physiological and phenological departments became the programme for this project. The location is ideal, with the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland (NBGI) and the new Luas line only minutes away. The nature of this research facility

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meshes well with the surrounding domestic environments with its predominantly nocturnal and introverted presence. The driving force behind this project was to continue the bank of the canal and turn the awkward geometry of the site into something that is used throughout the seasons. I wanted to create a faint contact between the researchers and the members of the community, but at no point hinder the research in any way. The natural three and a half metre rise across the site was something I wanted to use to my benefit and, in doing so, create a public/private divide that was not immediately obvious. This divide exists in both plan and section, distinguished by a mirrored courtyard.

Paul Maher

PHIBSBOROUGH DESIGN CENTRE.

As a case of urban infill on a fractured block, this project aims to relate to the surrounding conditions in terms of scale, materiality and function. The Phibsborough design centre comprises workshops, a community arts centre, gallery and live/work units for artists.

Conceived as a punctured brick and concrete form, the building aims to reflect both its rough and refined functions. Wrapping around a block of terraced houses, a working courtyard is formed.

The life-cycle of a piece of art, from raw material to finished piece circulates through the building from workshop to gallery.

The project is split into two elements: a taller, public block which

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forms a hard edge to the street and relates to the scale of St. Peter’s church, and a lower scale private block which addresses the terraced neighbourhood and Great Western Square. The street facing element, a punctured and open form, reflects its public functions, such as galleries and community workshops. In contrast, the rear element is more monolithic in its language to articulate the robust workshop functions. A ground level route is opened between the private and public elements of the building, allowing permeability throughout the site and a public route into the working courtyard. The project aims to build on a cultural and artistic Phibsborough, while providing a community focal point.

Donnchadha Gallagher

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STUDENT ACCOMMODATION. The concept for this project is to establish a center or system of trade for Cabra, Phibsbrough, and Glasneven. The site is located between the three districts, which are divided by the Royal Canal and the Great Western railway line. The project’s objectives are to make use of the disused or wasteland areas to the north of the canal by cultivating the land into a series of allotments. These allotments will be allocated to the neighboring communities to encourage a sense of ownership over the area. The surplus food produced from these allotments will be housed and then brought

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to the south of the canal over a new bridge to St. Bernard park, where the aim is to establish a bimonthly market where trade of all varieties is encouraged. Finally there is a third building, more prominent in scale, which will act as a gateway building between the allotments and the trade center. The brief of this building is to provide flex spaces for all three community districts to hold meetings, preform shows or small productions and hold lectures of community interest. The main aim of this building is to integrate the community with the students of the nearby Grangegorman DIT campus.

Shane Morgan

MICRO-BREWERY.

Perched on the edge of an old rail line, the site abuts a crossroads of the consistently busy North Circular Road and the sunken, disused Great Western Railway.

With the re-integration of the LUAS tramline along this marshy, scenic route, an urban environment is created. The site itself is surrounded by typically lower density housing. Sandwiched between Cabra and Phibsborough Village, there are very few public destinations in the area. The main use of the area is to get through it to somewhere else. A decision was made to create a public plaza in the heart of the site, allowing moments of rest within these busy corridors. Pedestrian route-ways were created

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joining the North Circular Road with Cabra Road, allowing a more generous entrance to the newly installed light rail. For the site itself, a recessed frontage coupled with an active growth buffer softens the noises of these to allow for that moment of rest, or at least a calm before it begins anew. In the heart of the scheme, a micro-brewery dwells underneath the floating plaza, giving glimpses of itself to elevated positions. Holding onto the ideals of the lifeline’s caretakers, the micro-brewery utilises artisan craft, local skill sets and natural ingredients. It comes from a rich tradition of brewing within Dublin City and part of a renewal of interest in the advantages of agricultural responsibilty.

Alex Stupar

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VELODROME.

The aim of this project was to celebrate cycling on both casual and competitive levels. A massive floating roof houses the new train station, 166m velodrome track,

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community centre and gym. The building is made entirely of timber and glass with glu-lam trusses in the roof system to create a clear span over the entire scheme.

Elaine Wynne

BATH HOUSE, PHIBSBOROUGH. This scheme is based around a disused railway line that runs from Broadstone to the middle of the country. The project is fuelled by the need for a suitable building to connect the future Luas line to the community.

There has been a history of public baths in the area which ended in the 1970s. Two of these baths were no more than ten minutes from the site. Supplementary to this the only swimming pool in the area has shut down in the past year. My initial concept was about three elements: a bath-house and pool, residential units and a Luas hub. I wanted to give each of these elements their own identity. The first problem I encountered was that the size

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of the site was too small to accommodate the pool at ground level as it meant that the rest of the site would be inaccessible or unusable. Therefore in the first stage of the project I chose to raise the pool and bath house up off the ground. This led to my conceptual idea of two floating boxes: one would contain the pool and bath house while the other would be subservient and contain residential programme designed for people who come to get treatments or use the bath house or compete in swimming competitions. Once the bath house was raised up this led to the nature of the second part of my concept: forest of columns.

Bernard Brennan

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CHURCH AND THEATRE. With multipurpose public spaces which are organised in a spiral that ends with a marriage chamber with spectacular views over the city. Evangelical church groups which rent industrial buildings in the locality are consolidated and joined by a new experimental branch of the

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national theatre, which moves from the history and tradition laden Abbey St address. Differences in level across the site and fluxes relating to the new Luas terminal, the DART station and surrounding community and industrial estates are resolved by a plinth with parking underneath and a new plaza at ground level.

James Browne

THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

Two scales of typology border a busy street, a school of music, and several performance spaces. The main opera hall is situated against Thomas Street to the north, creating an entrance below an overhang, and affording the school quieter spaces behind.

A second entrance, to the west, offers a view up through an atrium, to most of the school. These two typologies are brought together in the atrium space in the heart of the building, where a cafe, bar and student common areas offer an intermediate atmosphere, between the school and the performance spaces.

Users can experience the depth of the building and, with this, it’s

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various musical and educational functions: the making of music.

Visitors are drawn to this area below the atrium via a stairs, which then leads on to the opera hall. The chamber music hall is adjacent, and there is a service area which serves both these performance spaces, and the hall for the symphony orchestra.

A break between the black concrete envelope of the opera hall, and the floorplates to the south, allows light to the passageway below. Above this, the structural module of the school building is continued across, where there are more educational facilities.

An 18th century research room is in the Victorian building to the west, itself connected back to the RIAM internally.

o of the practice rooms to test the daylightthen used this model to test the daylighting es during the year and at different times of d the shape of the roofscape for optimum pace. Also, I used this model to begin an and finishes within the space.

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a single practice space to investigate strucwithin the space. This model allowed me to as, such as, the sequence of construction, acoustics and materials.

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ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC. The brief for the new school of music has two main goals: first, tuition and practice spaces for RIAM students and secondly, to engage the public with the school. These two aims define the nature of the school—private school spaces and public performance areas. Dublin’s Thomas Street is in the heart of one of Dublin’s oldest quarters, the Liberties. This area is characterised by a small-scale urban grain and a medieval street layout. Thomas Street is lined by a facade of small shop fronts with residential overhead. These facades engage with the street, while the residential area overhead is a private world. In this way, the

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original typology of Thomas Street, that of living over the shop, satisfies the two aims of the RIAM for their new school. The new school on Thomas Street is an adaptation of the existing Georgian buildings on the street. In section the school has three levels of occupancy: group music below ground, tuition spaces above ground and individual practice spaces in the roofscape.

The larger ensemble spaces are below ground in a concrete piece that slides under Thomas Street and below the central courtyard. Above ground, light wells take the place of the original shop windows, allowing passers-by a glimpse of the world below.

Kevin Coffey

ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC. The concept for the project was to draw the visitor into a set of interior ‘streets’, which create dramatic canyon-like negative spaces between the buildings. This gives the project an intimacy usually only felt in a continental setting. It is appropriate for Dublin in this instance due to the collective nature of the buildings – the buildings are arranged to give the visitor a calculated sense of enclosure. A route is indicated from the street – through the café – to the gardens behind St. Catherine’s Church. This garden is usually hidden from the street and the new building opens up both the occupant and the passers-by to a new experience.

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The building forms radiate out from the central core of the complex. Here, even the newest visitor can navigate the building without needing much assistance due to the short distances involved. The café that faces the street becomes the foyer space for opera performances, while the symphony hall is reached via steps leading off the central core. The opera and symphony hall are shrouded in a dark timber cladding, immediately setting them apart from the rest of the buildings in the complex. The dramatic contrasts of light and dark, high and low, open and closed, tall and squat, far and near, reflect the nature of the classical music studied within the walls.

Shane Morgan

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ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC. The concept of this project came about after looking at the grain patterns and plot sizes of the existing fabric. The rhythm of Thomas Street is very apparent, even on first arrival. The area is soaked in rich history. To minimise the impact of a large, dense structure in the environs, the plot sizes were maintained to keep the rhythm of the street. Long bars over-sail a constant facade defining the structure with various areas of programme. Large voids have been removed from the bars, creating spaces that allow for student interaction and playing. The voids contain planting and small trees to create visual connections between the structures.

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In the main music halls, construction build-up consists of ecocem reinforced concrete to minimise vibration resonance with partial timber slat cladding. The timber gives a warm tone, while dividing the space, both visually and acoustically. Externally the building is clad in an extruded aluminium mesh. This wraps over the opes, offering privacy without restricting light. The aluminium is from recycled sources, regaining up to 94% of the embodied energy. It contrasts with the warmer, more mellow quality of the interior timbers. An investigation of the cladding condition of the building, focusing on the specifics of the rehearsal space.

Brian Jordan

ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

The idea behind this project is the retention of the four existing buildings on Thomas Street, one of the oldest parts of Dublin City. An Sligh Mhor was an ancient route to the city and forms a major axis in the present day structure in the form of this street. A building of five storeys would add to the presence on the street, but not overshadow St. Catherine’s Church. The facade of the new building on Thomas Street is informed by the existing street condition. An indent on the facade keeps the shape of the

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footpath and is seen as a natural point at which the footpath widens, where the entrance is located. Clients interested in a ‘chance encounter’ would be able to use the building. I also wanted to explore the idea of large circulation spaces in the form of stepped platforms into the ground. By creating a division of musical faculties—percussion in the ground or strings on the upper floors—this would change how the public engaged with the building from the street for passing through or for performances.

The route would be through, not around the building.

Jamie Conway

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ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

The building takes its form from the site boundary with the theatre placed centrally, embedded within the structure and encased by the remainder of the program. The theatre mass is contained between two voids with equal dimension, a public roof-lit atrium and the fly-tower. Public access is through a northern courtyard addressing Thomas Street and the school’s academic presence forms part of the streetscape and access for services

and students is through the southern courtyard. Sound and its proliferation throughout the common spaces establishes an internal metal structure of seven sound networks contained within the supporting beam section and allows highly controlled ventilation and soundscapes to be introduced to the rooms through an internal perforated oak lining. This network also penetrates the roof to become a ventilation stack, sucking air in and forcing stale air out through fenestration.

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ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

This building comprises the majority of the school program for the RIAM. In it, is housed tuition, rehearsal and accompanying ensemble rooms for string, brass, vocal and keyboard musicians. It is a very simple structure that is based on a modular framework derived from the space required to house instruments of this nature.

The facade takes this modular framework and embellishes it further. The vertical structural lines become hidden amongst a

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“serialist� arrangement of vertical elements. The aim of this was simply to create an abstract composition that was decentralised and that played with the idea of repetition and the contrast of the horizontal and the vertical. The smaller of the two auxiliary buildings comprises additional program for the school of the RIAM. In it is housed tuition and accompanying rehearsal rooms for wind and percussion. It is the same structural and modular framework used in the first building. Additionally, the facade works along the same basis.

Paul Maher

ABBEYLEIX

BIOETHANOL PLANT. Unused farmland has become a problem in Ireland. EU incentives mean that farmers are encouraged to not farm their land. The result is large areas of land that are declining in agricultural use. If bureaucracy is ignored, local farmland could be used to provide for and sustain a town. The town’s landscape and countryside would become a positive structuring and generative tool, food miles would disappear, and the town could become totally self-sufficient. This can be applied to Abbeyleix, the existing agricultural buildings can be readopted and an agricultural focus reinstated. Buildings with an agricultural and/or residential

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function are proposed to act as catalysts, offering society an opportunity to reconnect with the land. Organised in a radial pattern, the farmland will comprise grain (flour, biofuel, etc), livestock and fruit/veg. The aim is that all food and fuel for the town will be provided by the surrounding land. Empty fields located between the main street and the peripheral housing estates will become working farms, creating new plot lines and pedestrian routes in the landscape and reinforcing movement towards the town centre. A bio-ethanol plant is introduced to one of these vacant fields. Defined by a monolithic mill tower, the factory represents a move towards self-sufficiency.

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REMNANTS OF A HALF ACRE. At the time of its foundation as a market town for the De Vesci Estate, tenants were given a home with a half acre of land to the rear and an acre for use elsewhere. From this it has developed in a linear fashion along its main axes with recent housing developments being built at the periphery of the town. As a result, vast amounts of space are left as backlands behind the hard edge of the main street due to the dense grain of the urban fabric. This proposal intends to explore these backlands which mainly remain unused and to create a third dimension to the town behind the main street, a new layer which will create public spaces and new routes around

the town. The centre of the town would be sustainably developed to a suitable density with housing, buildings for the townspeople and the encouragement of small, local industry. This particular proposal includes: a theatre space seating 160 people, a cinema screen and a meeting room for the community. Housing has been introduced as three family homes and two smaller homes with dedicated studio spaces. The long-term vision of this proposal is that it can be expanded upon when required, with an emphasis on linking with the existing estates. It could also be applied to other parts of Abbeyleix or, in fact, other towns in Ireland where this dense grain pattern and backlands exist.

James Browne

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ABBEYLEIX. The idea of this project is the typology of a typical Irish town. Through a series of strategic planning decisions, a pattern of development is established that will bring it back to its position as a locally self-sufficient community. The aim is to integrate the estates at the periphery into the town, encouraging the “untapped� populations to use the town on a more regular basis. This involves the establishment of a network of pedestrian pathways through parklands, offering an alternative to the car biased entry roads, and the thickening of the complexity and quality of the main street without compromising its definition.

Car parking will be provided between the blocks, and the

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new buildings will face the green areas. Future residential development to be in the form of terraced housing behind the existing core buildings. The parklands are designed with the aim of indicating the pattern of future development. The pathways follow existing field boundaries. Here the existing hedgerows are maintained and the park will be planted with high and low native trees and shrubs. At the nodal point of the routes is a square, which leads to the heart of the town, the market square. The square is enclosed by two bed live-work units to the south, and a sustainability research centre to the north, with a passage through the building to the parklands beyond.

Ruth Hynes

THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE TOWN LIVING IN IRELAND. This project is about acknowledging the network of commuter towns, the vast web of motorways and adapting to a mobile work environment. One way is to reduce commuting, thereby reducing our energy consumption. The worker and the workplace have evolved. The mobile worker’s needs differ to the traditional view of an office and as internet technology advances, workers can work from a variety of locations. A new typology is created to embrace these aspects.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4

The Open Innovation and Enterprise Hub with adaptable, open, bright and social spaces are key to this venture. Abbeyleix as a Linear Park. Re-establishing the primary axis of Abbeyleix and creating an amenity of the street itself and allowing recreation space will attract locals and visitors alike to this green space, the heart of Abbeyleix and local life. The Market Square is also pedestrianised to provide a new cultural hub centred around the recently refurbished Library, local pubs, restaurants and Proposed Innovation Centre.

Donnchadha Gallagher

90

KILCOCK NEW TOWN CENTRE. This town is divided into the medieval town to the north of the canal and the sprawling estates to south. The connection between the two is weak, but can be strengthened by the reallocation of parking from the fair green on the south of the canal to a vacant lot to the north, as well as the construction of a pedestrian bridge which picks up on a line through a town block and feeds the main square. One of the main goals of this project is to improve permeability from the estates to the town. By removing the cars from the market square and pinning back to road to the east of the square, a hierarchy of space for public use is created. The small road that slips by

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the square to the west is closed off for pedestrian use and a new lane is cut through the adjacent town block to provide access to the new and existing residential areas. The square itself is to be resurfaced in a variety of cobbles and stone slabs in patterns that help organise the space for markets but keep it flexible to larger town events. There are three proposed buildings for the square, the first one being the conservation of the dormant Christian brothers building that holds the square to the north. The second and third buildings are an art gallery and apartments that repair the fabric of the block that lines the square to the west.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4

Anna Pierce

92

KILCOCK LANEWAYS. “Work is something you do, not something you travel to�. This project seeks to improve the lives of the inhabitants of Kilcock by breaking down barriers and improving permeability to the town. By identifying the physical barriers including tall estate walls, blank gable walls and dead ends, nodes were established that could be used to link disjointed areas and provide much needed community facilities.

These hubs of community activity are linked by a series of new

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mews lanes that allow the existing inhabitants to increase their living/working space and use their back gardens more effectively.

The mews developments densify the area and increase diversity by encouraging residents to live and work at home. Working from home allows greater flexibility, reduces traffic and also makes it easier for disabled people to work. The community facilities can support these businesses and provide larger facilities such as conference rooms, function rooms and research facilities.

Olivia Hillery

ABBEYLEIX HONEY AND BEE-KEEPING.

This proposal for Abbeyleix creates a honey industry in the town. This industry begins in the bog where beehives will be kept during the summer months. The bee hives will then be brought to the various production facilities seeded in the backlands of the town of Abbeyleix. The production units are intended to reinforce the main street and will have a distinctive medieval character.

Products produced in these units are then sold from existing retail units on the main street. The honey industry will create a strong local economy in the town of Abbeyleix, giving the town an identity. With the development in the honey industry there will be

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4

an inevitable increase in population. This population increase is catered for in new residential units integrated into the production facility units. An increase in population will be supported by facilities (schools, creches, gym and community centre) leading to a sustainable future for the town of Abbeyleix. The beehouse is the first step in the honey industry. Seeded at the back of the market, the bee-house will take honey from the beehives and prepare it for selling, either to consumers at the market or to other production units as an ingredient in mead, soap, beeswax, fudge, lipstick, or other items. The bee-house contains three residential units to accommodate an increasing population.

Jamie Conway

94

Abbeyleix is a town richly endowed with heritage and architectural harmony. This would suggest a flourishing urban centre, however, on closer inspection one can see that the town has become stagnant through neglect both in terms of community services and until very recently the intense traffic congestion through the town. In recent years, the town has experienced some growth, although has been spared the relentless expansion of some other towns in Dublin’s catchment area. They have little architectural consideration and are not informed by the built heritage of the town or its layout. Currently the town under-utilises its vast potential (historical, recreational and sport) due to the lack of

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local discussion, debate and self organisation. The following proposal seeks to create a new typology, an urban ‘Living Room’ containing space for childcare, a park for recreation, a reading and dining room, and a town meeting room. The siting for this building is such that it re-enforces the strong existing route going north-south linking the north and south churches, the town square, the main street, the hall, the GAA grounds, the tennis grounds and the primary school. The external expression is of local stone with a substantial insulating layer and a fair-face concrete inner layer. The roofs are bronze which catch water used for the day to day requirements of the building.

Simon Harrington

ABBEYLEIX BOG.

The town of Abbeyleix can be characterised by its unique planned form and its relationship with Abbeyleix House, designed in 1773 by James Wyatt for John II, Viscount de Vesci. In many cases, the back of the town’s buildings meet farmland in a direct manner and this relationship between agrarian land and the built environment becomes an interesting condition, which repeats itself. Dense woodlands offer a different type of boundary to the town while providing hidden

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4

trails for more adventurous walkers. Another type of landscape emerges alongside these woodlands. A hundred hectare bog lies to the south of the town. Killamuck Bog is the most south-eastern raised bog in county Laois. The land was given to the community of Abbeyleix by Bord na Mona. This proposal examines the potential resources of the bog and offers a solution which would connect this landscape to the town, educating both locals and visitors about the rich biodiversity and promoting eco-tourism.

Grace Counihan

96

COURTYARD MUSIC. This project began from an idea about a split circulation between students of the RIAM and the public coming to watch performances. Layout is generated to maximise the required sound levels and light intensities for certain types of rooms. Smaller practice room, not in use during the day, buffer the sound from the peripheral large tutorial rooms and the corridors and atrium. Natural stack ventilation is expressed in the faรงade through a series of expressed ducts. Each room is looked at as an autonomous bock where some protrude out and some

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recess back in to create an undulated skin structure and allow visual connections between rooms. A large exposed stairs draws the attention of the public to the school of music and to the large internal atrium seen from the street. As one descends under the arch in the stairs you enter into the foyer for assembly before concerts. It is a cast concrete structure and timber lining with air cavities and baffling, which lines the rooms depending on the levels of acoustic buffering required.

Anna Pierce

ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

“Architecture as a Musical Instrument”. This project seeks to explore architecture through the medium of music and sound. The building becomes a musical instrument, an instrument of parts.

Each sound is stacked vertically and the internal walls absorb

Architecture and Urbanism Year 4

and reflect the sound out through a series of ‘vents’. The vertical voids inbetween these stacked ‘instruments’ act as a buffer, yet they also combine individual sounds. These void spaces refract the music so that it echoes and chimes through the building and it becomes alive with music.

Dermot Boyd / Dominic Stevens 5th Year Studio Tutor

Traditionally, as in many schools, the thesis has been seen as an opportunity for the student to make an individual architectural proposition, to orchestrate a brief, locate a site and design a building. This building or project was also of a certain size and complexity in order that the thesis would be seen to adequately test the students’ ability to manage and synthesize a large programme into built form.

In managing fifth year, especially in the new modularised programme, we saw the opportunity to challenge this well-established paradigm. We used the History Theory Criticism Studio Module established in Semester I as a means of introducing the students to a new way of critically thinking about the thesis. The thesis is not a project but an architectural idea, an idea that can be applied and guide a building programme. It is the idea that defines architecture.

This idea can be abstracted but should be implicit and explicit in the realised project. It is the quality of the idea, its application or realisation through space that is the true test of the thesis.

If the students were to adopt a historical, theoretical and historical idea, there seemed a need to attach that abstract world to the real world and a more immediate spatial and social need. The land in control of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) seemed the ideal vehicle.

This unique crisis that we find ourselves in as a nation is too often seen as an economic and political issue, but it is also a real social and environmental one. The State (through NAMA) effectively controls a vast area of developable land. These sites are now seen to have been exploited for short-term profit during the Celtic Tiger and, in many cases, their buildings or proposals do not provide a sustainable environment for the future. The NAMAlands project enabled the students to develop a counter-point to this situation, critically assess individual sites in the Dublin area and project an alternative architectural and urban solution. Their architecture seeks to serve the social and infrastructural needs of the surrounding local community.

NAMAlands gave students the freedom to explore advanced architectural thinking in an academic context where the choice of brief and site did not become paramount. What became critically important was the ambition and justification of the individual ideas of the students in spatial and social terms. We continued to see architecture both as a theoretical and practical discipline. The built idea remained the final and cumulative assessment in fifth year.

The cross-fertilization between the THS and HTC modules proved most interesting this year as it in many ways revealed the divisions that lie between the practice and theory of architecture.

Divisions that should not exist but through the application of theoretical critique (and literary criticism) in academia, architecture is becoming more an abstracted idea about culture and not a built idea about the reality of life.

To explore an architectural idea or intention is, of course, critical to good practice and it is in many ways what divides good architecture from bad architecture. The key factor is the usefulness of the architectural idea. There was also a need this year for students to verbalise or write about their work. This often revealed shortcomings both in the continuity of their thought but also in their ability to clearly articulate their idea in spatial and literal terms. In many ways the architectural idea should simply be a spatial one as it is through space that architecture is realised. Different ideas are evident at every stage of the process of design, what became critical was the need to use the architectural idea or thesis as a conduit through which to challenge or test all architectural thinking, approaches to site, use, technology, material and structure. This layering of consequential and lateral thinking developed a self-awareness and critical thought in the students, an ability essential to masters level students.

We either choose to broaden out architectural education and apply it across disciplines or ‘dwell poetically’ in our own world. For me, architecture (and urban design) offers a wealth of conceptual possibilities. Possibilities that so many times in practice are not defined or not articulated in the real world and one too often remains disappointed by the architectural compromises that are made or designed around us. This is the disjoint that needs to be addressed through third level education. An appropriate balance needs to be struck between using architecture as the means of critically contemplating the world in order to exercise an influence on society and culture and equipping the students with proper skills and the knowledge to make great spaces. Architecture should essentially speak for itself and, through its very presence, begin to shift philosophical thinking.

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Breffni Greene

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ENTRANCE FIRST AID POST ATTENDANT’S POST PLANT ROOM COMMUNAL CHANGING AREA LOCKERS CHILDREN’S CHAMBER OPEN-AIR DIVING CHAMBER DIVING PLATFORM LENGHTS CHAMBER TIDAL SEA BATH [ATTACHED] TIDAL SEA BATH [SEPARATED] PUMP ROOM HEATING PLANT ACCESS TO SEA SUN TERRACE RESERVOIR

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100

THE CLONTARF NATATORIUM. A series of saltwater pools have been designed under the principles derived from the tradition of sacred architecture through tectonics and rigor of the ritual. These bathing chambers each offer the user a series of alternate experiences by naturally altering the temperature of the pools, salt content and depth of water.

Threshold plays an important part to the scheme with the transition from dry land through a sequence of spaces to ultimately become engulfed by the sea. The journey from the everyday life and the dirty city is slowed down by the sequence of chambers before dipping into the vessels or plunging into

the cold sea. The return cycle is also considered as one comes back out of the sea and uses the rain shower. Then, one acclimatizes in one of the warmer baths or perhaps basking in the sun on the terrace before dressing, to be thrown back into the city again with a calmer mind and relaxed body.

Built on a flood zone, these individual chambers operate in conjunction with a series of reservoirs which replenish the water supplies twice daily. Both the chambers and vessels are constructed from copper patinated concrete and lined with mosaic tiles reflecting the colours of the shelters found along the promenade. Terrazzo is used for all circulation routes.

David Bradshaw

MIGHT THE COLLECTIVE BECOME COMMUNAL THROUGH ARCHITECTURE. The proposed subject is a mosque, a public house for the Muslim community, in the Portobello neighbourhood of Dublin. The mosque, as an extension of the public realm, provides a place for the collective to come together and dwell, becoming the physical manifestation of a community within the fabric of the city.

The project alludes to a preindustrial image of city, a reference to the nineteenth century practice of positioning a church within the mass of the block, adopting a premodern spatial strategy

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

in conjunction with a radical democratic sensibility to achieve an equality of the parts and an informality in the whole: a nonspectacular articulation of otherness. The tectonic representation of Islam within the city is essential if the community is to be identified as part of the collective. Thus, as the population increases the hegemony of established identities inevitably becomes contested and accordingly must be reconsidered. The public house provides the terrain where new forms of collective identification and community might be exercised.

Thomas Comerford

102

A COMMUNAL STREET: EXPLORING ARCHITECTURE OF THE COLLECTIVE. The original intention for the site was to build a five-storey office block above ground. The aim of this project is to present a gift to the city, to create a comfortable environment to encourage people to work and meet others. This public building will provide a facility to enable people to start their own businesses. It will act almost as an outreach post for organisations involved with small businesses with easy informal access to representatives for such

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organisations. The key is to provide a generous, civic-minded building that promotes an atmosphere of industry that is open and accessible to the public. Certain programme elements are included to encourage people to meet and possibly harness the potential of chance encounters in relation to creating employment opportunities. The aim to create a building that the public feel they own, that they can migrate through casually or simply work in. Increasingly, people are becoming more mobile in their needs to work and the scheme aims to respond to this tendency.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Kenny Ward

104

URBAN HYDROLOGY. Urban Hydrology refers to the process proceeding from a view of water as a passive element in architecture, to one of water as a more active element in the formulation of not only the brief, but the tectonics of the final project. The decision to create an urban trout farm was influenced very much by the site conditions. The existing excavated site, which was already partially holding water, leant itself to an internal garden or space. However, rather than create another public square in such close proximity to Grand Canal Square, or create a conventional garden, the decision to create a water

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based productive garden led to the introduction of the trout farm. This is very much influenced by the productive history of this part of the Docklands. Over the winter, the severe weather highlighted the extreme deficiency in the Dublin City Water. This presented a social aspect to the scheme in terms of giving back to the city, which led to the creation of the urban water resevoir.

The idea was that, as the edge wraps around the perimeter, the fish ponds are partially concealed. However, as in a walled garden, at points the oasis within is revealed through a series of vistas, creating glimpses through to the inner productive landscape.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Cormac Nolan

REVEALING AN ARCHITECTURE.

ATTENDING

MOTORWAY

The motorway is the scene of the most frequent and populous congress of anywhere in the country and operates without the intelligence of architecture. This project stems from a rebuttal that architecture has no jurisdiction over infrastructure. Infrastructure is entirely the effect of the way we want to live our lives and therefore inexorably associated with culture and subject to architectural consideration. It explores an architecture which would symbiotically reflect and challenge the vastness of our motorway infrastructure. Man’s physical

and social relationship with the road is at once a platform for an architecture accessible to the masses and a challenge of mass-produced architecture. The scale, impermanence, capacity for mass communication, and relationship to its immediate environment makes the billboard an unusual and dynamic platform for creative output. This encounter between the artwork, its context, and the viewer can spark unanticipated and intriguing associations. The audience is typically the accidental viewer—those who happen upon the image inadvertently.

Gareth Ryan

106

AN ARCHITECTURE OF EMPOWERMENT.

What does this mean? As a strictly architectural idea, it is difficult to imagine. If one says ‘empowerment in architecture’, it does not necessarily conjure up specific images. I see it almost as more of a question of society, community, and the relationship between it and architecture. Originally, it was to mean an architecture that could be affected by those who would eventually become the inhabitants, where those inhabitants or users would have a direct role in the design and construction—a somewhat democratic architecture. Examples of the same are most often seen in third world societies, at the edge of sprawling cities. In

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such cases, the populace must face the fact that the government will not necessarily provide all the needs of the poor, forcing them to fend for themselves, build for themselves and design for themselves. A community based brief does not require large scale intervention and thus there is no need to compete with the scale of the buildings already there. A smaller, more discreet intervention can make a more powerful difference by allowing the community to generate a more intimate relationship with it. The aim of this project is to create harmony between disparate groups within the area by providing facilities where one has the opportunity to meet others from the area.

Olivia Rusk

ENABLING SOCIAL INTERACTION THROUGH THE PHYSICAL. The site chosen for this project is traversed by a large portion of the public. Situated in close proximity to Busaras, it means that people availing of public transport services provided by these termini pass the proposed site frequently. The scheme is divided into different strata of activity by social interaction. Ground level is given to the public and public amenities, while on the upper levels of the scheme— contained within the vast steel superstructure—are the sports

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

facilities. The concept of social interaction is carried throughout and is revealed as the different users move through the building.

Throughout, there is a concept of transparency and visibility, allowing relationships between the different activities to be established: from the basement level with its connection to the pool through the warm, glass blocked wall of the steam room, to the views into the sports facilities as the public climb the central staircases to the restaurant and pool hall, to the space where the public and private worlds collide once again in the main sports hall.

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Conchúir Ó hÁrgáin

108

THE ARCHITECTONIC LANDSCAPE. A Molten Productive

PRODUCTIVE

Landscape, A Cutlers Smithfield. There is a morphology of space and material, as the charcoal and pig iron transform into molten steel. The space will focus itself on the intense movement of the molten steel. Soot will create a layer of process on every material.

Smoke will fill the depth of the roof. Steam will fill the space,

as the molten steel is tempered in water. The condensation from the tempering baths will signify the steels readiness to be refined. A graded attrition of stone, water, and metal, reveals the soul of the blade. A burnished and honed instrument. A timber stock is chosen to mediate the precision of blade and hand. Necessity becomes tradition. Tradition becomes culture.

Caoimhe Loftus

ARCHITECTURE ACCOMMODATING LONG TERM URBAN LIVING. A study of Dublin’s urban fabric revealed an unsustainable pattern of residential accommodation.

It was identified that the majority of the city’s population live outside of the city core and the majority of the people who live in the city centre fit into a very limited demographic: mostly young professionals without children. This thesis was tested by studying an existing apartment building. Following this study, a proposal was made to show how apartments could be combined and modified to attract people to live long term in the city. The

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

thesis was applied on a brownfield site in the Liberties. The urban block was reinforced with new dwellings onto the street.

Another level of occupation was provided by creating a new route through the urban block and a communal space at the heart of the scheme. This was complimented by the provision of private garden spaces to the rear of each dwelling. The design of the individual dwellings was largely influenced by a study of the existing housing types in the area. Clarity of public and private realm was essential to the success of this scheme.

Ina Kennedy

110

JERVIS ACADEMY SECONDARY SCHOOL. A promotion of public involvement through form was an integral part of the scheme. A public realm is placed at ground level and the private school realm sits on top. A visual connection occurs between these realms. The edge of the street is re-defined and an active, engaging façade is also provided in order to re-invent the character of the mews street. A series of squares link Strand Street Great to Abbey Street. The school is for secondary level children and the entire community alike. This will create a dialogue between building type and context, which will develop the building

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and further its place in the context. It will be used for night classes, community meetings, lectures and exhibitions. The school is designed to integrate the year groups into one community. The connection between each of the floors is the open and lively stairwell which is a continuation of the break-out space on each floor. Visual connectivity is provided up and down the stairs, which is generously wide to allow for chance encounters, social exchange and communication between the different year groups.

The stairs acts as the ‘Street’ connecting each of the different ‘Neighbourhoods’, which make up the school’s community.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Jonathan Fahy

Recycling Centre

Theatre

Bakery

Market Storage

Delivery & Arrival

Theatre Bar

Cafe

Bar Cafe

WaterHarvesting / Drainage

Freezing

Tourist Office

Smoking

Drying

Cafe

Packaging

City Hall

Ground Floor Plan 1:200

SPACE AS AN INSTRUMENT.

This looks at space as a system of individually treated and designed elements, that come together to create a space that sings. The Fish Market for Moore Street aims to be an instrument for the city by combining with the proposed square between O’Connell Street and Moore Street to bring 24-hour activity and life to an area of the North Inner City that lacks it. The Fish Market adds to the area by introducing cafes and restaurants and the Market Hall space, which becomes a ‘room for the city’ after market hours. It creates

an interaction with Moore Street and addresses the proposed square. An element important to seeing Space as an Instrument is the importance of a visual process—a craft and tradition that can be seen in the object or building. For this reason the Process of the preparation of Fish becomes enhanced and celebrated; each part of the process being housed in its own uniquely designed brick block and being displayed to the customers at all times. These, then, form the boundary to the central market space and support the market floor and Larchwood roof.

Jon Loewen

112

THE PERIPHERY CLUB. Located at 3 College Green, the Periphery Club occupies the shell of what was originally the centre portion of Patrick Daly’s Club (1791-1823), a social club and gambling house for aristocrats and members of Parliament. In its time, the club was renowned as a luxurious spectacle, but was equally known as a place for productive, non-partisan discussion under the guidance of Daly himself.

The Periphery Club adapts this memory, using the building (which has come under the control of the National Asset Management Agency) as a club for Ireland’s fiscal policy

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makers. The proposal takes a Joycean approach to memory and narrative to create space that reframes members’ perceptions of their colleagues, their role, and their city.

The building accommodates five distinct inhabitants: the host, a visiting expert conducting a residency at the club; the public, who are invited into and through the club for specific discussions and events; the members, fiscal policy makers who use the club socially and professionally, and who experience it through its alteration of their perception;

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

and the staff (the clubhouse’s true inhabitants), who operate in the interstitial spaces between other rooms and functions.

In section, the club has four distinct elements. The public ground floor connects College Green to the auditorium behind the building; the basement baths and first floor dining hall envelope the public realm in ritualised physicality; the timber club creates a narrative succession of spaces, with the fissures and gaps between creating opportunities to overlook and overhear; and the library and writing room conclude the club’s

perceptual reformulation with a new connection to the city.

Materiality and detailing are conceived as a field of symbolic fragments, with meaning accruing through sequence and memory just as in Ulysses. Rough stone gives way to concrete and travertine, and then to wood panelling which in turn fragments, disengages, and ultimately transforms, becoming leather and finally bronze mesh. Bronze appears throughout the building, symbolising the reflection, connection, and altered viewpoint that is the building’s purpose.

Laura Moloney

114

SYM • BOL • ISM. The architecture created here sends a clear message. The storage in the brief is broken down into five sub headings: Maps, Census Returns, Church Records, Law Records and Digital Storage. Each of the five is stored in a separate tower. The reason for storing the records in a tower is that the tower form allows the building to take advantage of the stack effect, combined with a mechanical heat retrievable system, this means less reliance on air conditioning systems to maintain the correct environment that books need to preserve them. The public circulation spaces lie underground. A reading

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room bridges the Law and Church towers, and provides a viewing platform for the city. Pedestrians are free to meander around the towers at ground level. There are two datum set. The first is the Reading Tower which is on level with the neighbouring Four Courts. The second is the pavement level.

All present day records are stored above this level, future records will be stored below. The reason for all these decisions is create a building which can be easily read, and in the hope that the building will become a future symbol of the city, portraying Ireland as a open country that engages with and celebrates its history.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Marie McGuinness

116

THE APPROPRIATION OF SPACE BY ITS INHABITANTS. The individual has the innate behavioural potential to appropriate space to their own needs. To transfer this study to an institutional level, I proposed an intervention into St. James’s Hospital Car park. This site provided me with different sets of inhabitants to consider in terms of the type and duration of appropriation that they require. Research into the history of the site, in particular the development of the site from its beginnings as a Poor House in 1703, provided valuable information about how the campus has developed into the way it is today, a disorienting

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and confusing campus, closed to the city. This is addressed with the volumes of my intervention, placed strategically to orientate you on the site. Thus came the brief of accommodation for the users/ families of the users of the hospital, along with the reorganisation of the public spaces and a celebration of the connection to the Car park. The tower volume forms a knuckle within this proposal and connections the two bars which contain the program. This element hosts a collection of public living rooms, a retreat from the institution, overlooking the city of Dublin.

Paul O’ Sullivan

THE BUILDING IN A NAMA CONTEXT.

When dealing with a problem, you should always go to the route of the predicament. I went to the route of the NAMA problem: the Anglo Irish Bank Headquarters shell structure. This building is a symbol of what NAMA is all about. It resembles many shell structures littering the countryside, unfinished due to the collapse of the Irish economy. On top of that, it was destined to be the corporate headquarters for Anglo Irish Bank, one of the main players in the collapse of the country’s economy. The Anglo Irish Bank headquarters is a 260,000 sq. foot building with ten floors, including two basement floors which were to

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

be used for car parking. It is a basic flat slab construction with four service cores. At an urban level the proposal is for a large plaza and parkland. My intention for the building is to turn it into a NAMA art gallery. Going back through history, in times of economic hardship there was large growths in culture. In November 2010 the Bank of Ireland chose to sell some of their private art collection. Due to the large public response to the sale of the art and the situation that our banks have created, a combination of all of the Irish banks private art collections is envisaged and put on public display in this building to create the largest and best collection of Irish modern art in the world.

Anna Monaghan

118

PATTERN IN THE SALVAGE HOUSE. The first part of this design process has been the establishment of goals regarding both the application of pattern and the achievement of particular spatial qualities,to suit brief and context. Perceived as a large shed sitting along a commercial industrial strip in West Dublin City, the Salvage House is designed as a series of utilitarian layers which perform together to allow for spatial creation, perception of scale, ventilation, day lighting and drainage.

Initially designed as five separate sheds splayed in response to site perimeter, the nature of the brief - a salvage yard & auction house, demands greater flexibility of spatial use. As

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such, the tartan plan extends beyond these five sheds to allow for a larger space, as covered by an intricate roofing system.

Transitional columns sit above a column & beam system, which themselves aids the creation of defined space within the larger expanse. Re-orientated, the pyramidal roofing sits atop these transitional columns and appear, from the building perimeter outside and within, as a delicate, ornamental parapet. Although each a repetitive pattern in their own right, when layered together, each space becomes dissimilar to its surroundings. The mind recognises the individual patterns but does not become accustomed to each spatial quality as the patterns are combined.

Claire Nolan

THE CREATION OF AN URBAN SANCTUARY. Sanctuary in an urban context involves the creation of a personal sense of place and space within the city, a sense of belonging and community and can be achieved through the creation of a space or series of spaces which momentarily remove or shield you from your urban surroundings.

The scheme includes two external spaces, Bowling Green Square and the less formal students square to the rear of the site. The facades explore an idea of layering. Those which face onto the public realm of the tram line and canal put up a more defensive front with specific access points, while those

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

which look onto the external sanctuary of Bowling Green Square are allowed to breathe more, with larger opes and a series of pocket spaces which allows them to be inhabited.

The entire scheme is concrete structure. The building benefits from thermal mass and southern aspect. Concrete and Iroko timber are the two main components of the material palette. All concrete is exposed internally with a gritty sand blasted finish for student spaces and a board marked finish in all other spaces. “We want a building to speak to us and to shelter us�. John Ruskin

Patrick O’ Connor

120

PERMANENCE. The project deals with the anxiety of history, its value and meaning in the conception of a contemporary architectural language. The brief is a contextual response to the historic identity of finance and civic authority of the immediate district of College Green and the identity of Temple Bar, a district of entertainment and tourism in the city.

The process simultaneously creates and destroys images of traditional architecture in an effort to understand their modes of representation and the semantic value inherent in historical forms.

In doing so, it highlights how contemporary architecture can establish a relationship with place and history without resorting

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to a superficial stylistic imitation or pseudo cultural references.

Casino design by its very nature is anti-architectural, a type where time is not measurable and space is undefined and readily manipulated by light. The controlled sources of light within the dark enclosure expand and unify the space by obscuring its physical limits, creating a world detached from the city. Shimmering, golden, domelike objects occupy the monochrome darkness meditating on the value of the physical.

Space is not static, but transformable and adjustable in synthesis with the ephemeral activity and life of the city, a departure from a static object to a mobile responsive architecture.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Paul Geoghegan

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1. Reception and Security area 2. Family Meeting Area 3. Toilet 4. Coffe Dock 5. Reception and Security area 6. Toilets 7. Reception and Security area 8. Store 9. Toilet 10. Family Meeting Area

122

ARCHITECTURE IS COMMUNICATION. Harcourt Square represents the unfinished piece at the end of a brick wall. The diverse multitude of cultures in its vicinity supports the suggested consulate brief, while the Garda Headquarters on site presents an interesting interaction within the architecture of the scheme. Historically, the site was used as a park, providing green space at the end of the Georgian Harcourt Terrace. The design seeks to repair the urban facade of the unfinished Georgian block, creating a friendly facade to the Garda Building, which contrary

to its passive surveillance, while provide refuge for those alien to the community. I started out with the position of inhabiting a facade. By taking the context of Harcourt St, and the buildings of Harcourt Square, I was first forced to survey the street externally.

An outsider, sketching surfaces and patterns. To me the street was a series of solids, each referring to each other. Window spaces are cut out of, pushed into and extruded to create variety, and a hint of a space within. Is the context my itself and existing inhabited facade, or merely spaces concealed by a facade.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Three types of spaces which are occupied within the building.

Firstly, there are exterior spaces cut into the block. This spaces allow sanctuary to the user. They provide a visible connection to the surrounding urban landscape, while still maintaining the atmosphere of privacy from the overlooking Garda Headquarters.

Typical spaces of this nature include foyer, security and meeting areas. The second space is that of the interior. These pochĂŠ spaces are again cut from the block. These present an internal set of occupied facades, which provide security to the user.

Typical spaces of this nature include reception, internal social spaces, family meeting areas, and coffee docks. Each a variation on a different zone of interaction. Thirdly are the more opulent spaces of the program, the First and Third Secretaries and Assistants Offices. These spaces must distance themselves from there surrounding structure, as they are representative of a space, pochĂŠ to the Host Nation. This spaces are constructed and lined in timber. The tectonics of each of these spaces vary depending on the home country to which they belong.

Laoise Casey

124

AN EXPLORATION OF CRAFT THROUGH ARCHITECTURE. When I think of the word “craft” I think of the careful consideration and time spent making something beautiful. My idea of craft is something which is made by hand.

I wanted to explore how craft can create architectural spaces.

The brief for my project relates to the historic trading era of North Wall Quay. The project grew from a simple school and gallery to an area which could generate business, industry, education and culture. The site directly relates its history to the new current function. The buildings consist of a gallery, a

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school, a timber warehouse and sawmill. The sawmill and trade school reconnects with the site’s history and reinterprets the site for industrial, educational and social activity. I wanted the character of the buildings I was trying to create to inform the type of timber construction and design decisions I was making. The language and character of each building is a direct reflection of its structure and technical strategy. Each building uses timber to achieve a specific function and sense of space with its own individual sense of timber intervention.

Stephen Bushell

TURNING THE COMMUTE INTO A TRAVELLING EXPERIENCE. The travel building has always marked the beginning or end of a journey; the station being a celebration of travel. Modern day commuting has deprived the passenger of this excitement. The grand canal DART station scheme attempts to reconnect the commuter back to this excitement: to enjoy what it is to travel, to meet and to exchange ideas.

On a social scale, the station creates an indoor square within the city and a public amenity next to the canal basin, allowing those who are not travelling to share the experience of travel

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

and watch the city function. The scale of the station and its influence as a significant piece of infrastructure in this area of the city allow its users to become more a part of occupying and ‘inhabiting the infrastructure’. Impacting upon a person in a small particular way - whether it is how the light changes across the roof structure as the commuter waits that extra moment for the train - the station leaves those who use it with some sense of achievement that they have marked this moment of travel, this tiny moment upon their life commute.

Wendy Adams

126

MANIPULATING MOVEMENT THROUGH ARCHITECTURE AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CIRCULATION SPACES. As a means of supporting Irish start-ups and innovation, a House of Entrepreneurship was proposed for Dublin city centre. With the provision of business incubators and Government funded research programmes, this facility would nurture start-up businesses in Ireland, moulding entrepreneurs in sustainable practice for the future.

This project celebrates movement manipulation in architecture and the majesty of a flight of stair. Drawing particular attention to

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the architectural “in-between space” and places where people in buildings congregate, this project unfolds spaces with dynamic interventions for the purposes of heightening the embodied experience of the architectural visitor in motion. The architectural strategy is based on the circulation route as an architectural promenade – a journey varying in spatial and material quality for the experience of the visitor. The manipulated route encourages informal meetings and interactions of the building users with controlled degrees of intensity. The staircase is used as an architectural tool of expression, not just functionality.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Conor Coughlan

128

THE INFLUENCE OF MEMETICS IN ARCHITECTURE. What is sustainability from an indigenous business point of view? How can local Irish businesses expect to maintain viability when they are constantly being undercut by the larger foreign supermarkets that source cheap goods from mainland Europe? This project proposes to provide a co-operative market which will act as a meeting place for two communities. It will provide a much needed service in the area while catering for the interests of the locality in the form of its public roof plaza, covered market space, community recreation rooms, creche, sports changing facilities and cafe/restaurant.

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The building imbeds itself in between two headlands focusing one’s view directly down the coast to Portrane. It stitches into an existing field pattern with the roof becoming a continuation of the landscape. The building’s relationship with the horizon and the coastline is vital. The rhythm of the structure becomes a series of bays in which market stalls are set up, each with a unique relationship to the horizon. The building’s roof becomes a meeting place, a public park, a podium on which the public take in the view. Ramped circulation is seen as a bent floor plane allowing seamless access to the public market and facilities below.

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Sean Attley

PRIMARY HEALTH CARE CENTRE. The thesis year began with an interest in the Venetian Campo and a painting of the Campo de San Lio in Venice. The painting represented an attitude for how one should build in the city. Each Campo had a clear and powerful expression of civic unity connected to some feature expressive of the natural forces of the region.

Dublin is a city defined by the beautifully landscaped gardens and planar brick terraces of Georgian houses. The city today is an expression of an idea and an absolute mark of individuality. These elements were a series of semi-autonomous classical fragments overlaid onto a once agricultural landscape or medieval city plan.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Coolock is a large suburban area in Dublin city’s north side. The suburb is a withdrawal from the city, low in density, lacking any diversity of type, sense of place and mix of use. The thesis project is a city structure similar to the squares that were designed during the Georgian times. These idealised gardens were the generator for a rational city plan and civilised living. It is hoped that by creating such a garden in Coolock, that the grain may over time be reconfigured and focus around the new nutrional research institute and primary health care centre. This site will be its own idealised city for researchers, practitioners and the community of Coolock.

Paul O’Brien

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MAKING ARCHITECTURE FURNITURE. The brief for the

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AS

SOCIAL

site is comprised of housing, a primary care facility, a Community Meeting House and service buildings. My principal focus has been on the urban design strategy for the site and of the of the Community Meeting House. The Meeting House comprises of a grand hall and a series of smaller multi-purpose rooms. I chose this building typology as I have discovered in new housing schemes for the city, the provision of a community room for the users. The outreach of my site is so vast that this is viable.

Whilst the materiality of the housing is that of brick and perforated screens, the Meeting House adopts a hybrid tectonic of concrete and timber post and beam structure.

This is a step away from the Irish Church/House institutional relationship of stone and brick. The Meeting House is the non-permanent piece of infrastructure across the site.

Just as there are furnished rooms as well as unfurnished ones, one can speak of furnished and unfurnished public spaces. The distinguishing feature of any square or any room is the enclosure of space. - Camillo Sitte

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Rachel Cribbin

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A TEMPORAL LANDSCAPE. This project is concerned with the exploration and architectural representation of time.

Booterstown marsh and Wildlife Reserve is a quintessential temporal site. By its evolution and its mechanics it has seen six phases of existence. Even its inhabitants are migratory.

The tide that enters and exits twice a day has created a rich, varied ecology which is incredibly delicate. The aim of the asylum is to accommodate human occupation in the marsh while allowing the fragile service afforded to the birds to remain

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protected. A great sensitivity and awareness was required. The delicacy of the site both dictated and hindered in the decision making process. However, these considerations and limitations lead to a unique brief and a means of execution that was both exciting and relevant. The approach was challenging, but has culminated in a landscape of perceptive pieces of architecture that are unified with the unique ecologies of the marsh.

Through proposing the introduction of human occupation into the marsh, another layer of considerations has emerged.

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Ronan Gallagher

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ARCHITECTURE OF THE BEYOND.

The site chosen was that of Leitrim House, 66-68 Stephen St. Upper, Dublin. The site is adjacent to Dublin Castle. The project considered the weight of this physical association with a historically and socially significant campus through its program.

If the NAMA represents the fragility of the nation at the hands of previously trusted figureheads, then this project aims to provide restitution through its program, ideology and representation. This equilibrium is sought through the social balance of our justice system. The building designed is a NAMA information centre, sheriff’s accommodation, tribunal centre and jail. An application

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of an architectural idea was developed through a study of an architecture of the beyond. To retain the Georgian House in itself was deemed to be appropriate, with contrasting strong styles to be used to articulate a dynamism of building use throughout the project. The spiral, as used, is an inherent piece of the project; it relates to concept, gives form, material/structural definition, spatial quality and governs light and air. The spiral implies eternity. It is constantly changing, similar to the circle, yet with a more complex construction. The uncertainty of the spiral brings a dynamism to the space, with no floor level exact, no place immediately definite.

Cian O’ Shea

ARCHITECTURE AS PLACE. The site is located just off the Clongriffin DART station approximately 8km from Dublin City Centre. This newly developed area is currently a vacant construction site, now owned by NAMA. This area is being developed as a ‘satellite’ town to Dublin City. The site has planning permission for two mixed use commercial blocks, apartments, and a tower element just off the DART station. The ambition of this project is to improve the conditions in which ideas for planning our environment are made. It is a

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

collective planning institute which invites various professions and a postgraduate student population. It has a public exhibition space of the institutes work on the ground floor. The work spaces above are cloister-like, which are permeable in section to the floor below. The ground plan is connected to the DART line and public space around. The tower-block student housing acts as a beacon to place. The aim of this thesis was not to configure an answer for architecture, yet it raises the question of the complexity of place, and indeed ‘architecture’ within place.

Louise Dwyer

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EMBEDDED IDENTITY. The brief was derived using the three strands, community, trade and celebration. The community aspect is looking at a place for people to come every day to meet friends and gather, a brief that compliments both the East Wall and Ballybough community centres. It is about encouraging a group of people living together in one place to practise a common ownership. The trade aspect will look at the large presence of small craftsmen in the area and also dealing with the unemployment of young training tradesmen. The idea is to provide a work space for them to learn alongside accomplished trades and to continue their craft. The workshop will also provide

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a retail unit to sell local craft and generate revenue. The third strand is a formal function hall; this space is inspired by the notion of traditional celebration. The hall can be used for dances, for teenage discos, for weddings, local meetings and community functions. There is the notion that the community can hold their own events within their area while allowing the wider city to be evolved. The idea of the community club is that people can come together as a unit, as a part of an organisation or group and as a member of a community. The community is a social endeavour that brings people together to celebrate the diversity of the everyday and of belonging to a place and community.

Kevin McKevitt

CREATING DEMOCRATIC SPACE THROUGH ARCHITECTURE. The NAMA Court was designed as a space to try, prosecute and expose those who have been complicit in bringing the Irish economy to its knees. The Court exists as a beacon in the landscape and an object within the Dublin skyline. The building utilises the existing structure of an abandoned basement below the Point Square. Devised as a public courthouse based about a singular atrium space which exposes the often introverted nature of the court to the public, the NAMA Court will constitute a modern democratic

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

courthouse for a changing society. The courthouse becomes a theatre of justice, unfolding as one ascends the monolith, where the presence of the public becomes part of the drama and a voice within the judicial process. The NAMA Court exists as two entities within a single object: an above ground of the courthouse and an underworld which traditionally functioned as jail and holding areas for the prisoners. However, this modern court reinvents the underworld as a nightclub, reacting to the unique location of the courthouse adjacent to the Point Theatre.

Irene Walsh

140

ARCHITECTURE, CULTIVATION AND DISTRIBUTION. As a student with rural roots, the dichotomy between city and country has always held a fascination. Dublin in particular, although only a tiny bud of a city on a global scale, is still seen as ‘The Big Smoke’. As a city which can still be relatively easily fed by its hinterland, and which retains close links with its

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rural neighbours, it is a particularly interesting case study under the topic of food. Dublin isn’t under the same level of pressure as a mega city like London to re-organise how it feeds its inhabitants, and yet, one can’t help but feel that with the gradual shift towards a more self-sustainable urban lifestyle, we won’t be far behind.

Aoife McAteer

AN EMOTIONALLY ARCHITECTURE. The Women’s

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

PRODUCTIVE

Refuge Centre is a complex of transitional housing for women and children fleeing domestic violence. The transitional housing is designed to facilitate varying sizes of families staying for any short length of time. The refuge deals with the intimate domestic language of the residential units and the institutional language of the refuge. The communal facilities of the refuge vary in their level of intimacy and openness to the public. The site strategy is influenced by

the plans of the Carthusian Monasteries. There is an outer court, which is semi-public, and an inner court, which is used only by the occupants of the refuge. The project is designed as one which is in tune with the essence of its occupants. There is a tone of elegance and femininity to this institution which the women of this refuge can emotionally connect to. through the use of an emotionally productive architecture, this refuge in the city becomes one which empowers and liberates its occupants.

Leanne Martin

142

PALIMPSEST AND MORPHOLOGY THROUGH ARCHITECTURE. The value of the land in this area is an

important issue that gives an understanding of the significance of the site as a commercial area. At ground floor level the pricing structure is arranged at 6m intervals. The 6m closest to the street commands the highest rental value, in this case â‚Ź13,500 per sqm. For every subsequent 6m interval the price is reduced by half, bottoming out at â‚Ź1670 per sqm by the time you have penetrated 18m into the block. When looking at Grafton Street,

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the project asked questions about value, which lent an economic theme to the project. There was an interest in looking at the idea of public space and opening up the valuable areas of the city that are neglected and degenerated. Re-weaving a public realm through a private block is a project about possibilities at an urban scale, possibilities for the integration of institutions into this ground floor cityscape, and possibilities to acknowledge the complex and ordered layering that makes up the city.

Andrew Guerin

URBAN MACHINE. The era of the electric vehicle brings with it the opportunity to mix typologies that traditionally could not be put together. The proposed brief isn’t just about parking cars, it is about the infrastructure in the city to facilitate the electric vehicle in Dublin. It is where members of the public with an electric vehicle can charge it while in the city. The workshop and test facility provide the needed facilities for the ongoing study and testing of the vehicles. The accommodation aspect to the

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

brief developed out of looking at the traditional motel typology and giving it a European Hostel twist. The social shift in recent years to “short stay, weekends away” in the era of cheap flights, has brought about a different type of clientele to the traditional traveller. With the internet powering so much of what we do and how we engage with the world around us, the fusion of the motel and Electric Vehicle Hub works within this shift in how we travel to and interact with our cities in the 21st Century.

Anna Monaghan - Venice

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STREET LIGHTING STRATEGY IN VENICE. Venice is a lost city. It is lost in time. But people also become lost in it. This feeling of disorientation can harm the tourist’s impression of the city – by becoming overly concerned with finding the landmarks and missing out on the real Venetian character within the city’s streets and alley ways. The social aim of this project was to provide a system of pattern, sequence and repetition so that the tourist may begin to feel less lost in the city, encouraging them to wander and linger along the streets of Venice and nurse an appreciation of a city that goes beyond

monument and museum…to highlight the ordinary so that you could simultaneously become lost in it and find something new.

This idea began in earlier studies concerning the distinguishment of space. In the National Gallery, this was art and sculpture. In Venice it is the many and varied windows and doors that line the canals, streets and alleyways. The Venetian intervention is a street lighting strategy for the assigned block within the city.

The lamps occur regularly along each street and acts as a logical overlay onto the chaos of the medieval grain (Fig. 3.19).

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

Each street has its own natural character but this can become tired to the tourists’ eye over time. Street lights will illuminate (metaphorically and realistically) the differences of each street, canal and alleyway, so that the visitor may become less preoccupied with finding their way and enjoy the moment they are in. The lighting strategy designed, therefore, contains a regular sequence of lights along any one street, but this sequence can change between any two streets, so the mind is constantly

challenged. This also uses memory of distinguishment; a feeling of a place is easier to remember when it differs from another.

The lighting strategy uses changes in height, frequency, intensity of light and number of lamps along a line to pronounce each space as individual. While the proposal for Venice focuses on the tourist and their desire for identification of space, the street lighting strategy also gives an identity to local people and the streets where they live.

Marie McGuinness - Venice

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VENICE. Having chosen to work in an area which consists of apartments that have been converted from administration buildings, the form and layout are therefore not ideal for living accommodation. To create a more semi-public and comfortable place for the residents to appropriate, I have proposed a simple steel structure. The rusted steel reflecting the areas industrial past. The form acts as a large entrance to the square, opening out to the public side, and converging towards the back of the square. The aim is to harness the Venetian skills that have been developed in the narrow streets. Here, you must be creative with your space, whether this be when you hang your washing out to

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dry, or use the simple hook on which you hang your rubbish bag on the wall, instead of the narrow alley. The idea is that each apartment will have access from their windows to appropriate a washing line to the structure in the centre, creating a new atmosphere within the space. Once it starts to be activated, it will encourage more ideas and activities within the space. The dimensions of the proposed intervention allows for four white bed sheets to be hung and used as a screen. The possibilities that are available to the residents are endless. I can see it as a goal, a swing set, a cinema, a washing line...a place where things can happen.

Breffni Greene

THE UNIVERSAL LANDSCAPE. The initial response to the site was to provide a new facility to compliment the services available in the area for the treatment of cancer. This would be achieved as a centre of meditation and sanctuary through the creation of a sequence of sacred spaces, which facilitate a palliative care approach to the treatment of cancer.

Palliative care is a form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than delaying progression of the disease itself or providing a cure. The primary aim is to prevent and relieve

Architecture and Urbanism Year 5

suffering and to improve quality of life for people facing serious, complex illness. The aim is to distinguish between the functions of the dedicated cancer treatment unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital and the voluntary work provided by St. Francis Hospice within the vicinity of Raheny village. Through the removal of the shopping centre, the green belt to the north can be re-linked to the village centre with a stronger visual link to the southern green belt, which joins up with St. Anne’s Park. In conjunction with this move, a stronger link would be made with the train station at the heart of the village.

extra curricular

Shane Morgan 4th Year Student

While the Department of Architecture and Urban Design maintains a strong focus on the design studio, many other activities, both inside and outside the school, are undertaken by the students and staff. These take their form in the physical mock-ups, essays and study trips across the year.

This year was a successful one, with participation from both students and staff across a wide range of initiatives. Utilising parametric modelling and CNC-milling techniques, a full scale test model was constructed from cardboard tubing, along with a laminated ply-wood teahouse, offering the students a small place to stop and rest. Running parallel to these constructed pieces research and texts were produced, some with graduate participation. The diverse range of topics highlights the different, but complimentary interests throughout the school, while fostering an atmosphere of learning through both language and making.

The study trips are undertaken by all years within the school and are an invaluable asset to the continued learning and experience of architecture for the students and staff alike. It grounds our process and allows us to be aware of the national and international effects of both new and old buildings. While all years undertook a trip this year, only the senior school is represented here. The 4th years undertook a study trip to Portugal, visiting Lisbon and Porto, producing a travel journal of sketches, photographs and models. The 5th years attended the Venice Architecture Biennale, engaging and learning from the varied approaches to the discipline.

Even outside of the academic year, the students are undertaking learning exercises. There has been a strong representation of DIT students at the European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA), with students running several workshops over the past few years. A variety and balance throughout the work seems to be the successful direction within the school, encouraging the varied discourse that underpins the strength of the school and the students.

MakeDo

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Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

MakeDo

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Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

MAKE.DO is a student group created following the 3twenty10 masterclass at the 2010 RIAI Conference in Westport. The group consists of architectural students and recent graduates from the various architecture schools of Ireland. The aim of the group is to promote architecture, art and design in Ireland and to make it accessible to a wider public. It is our belief that the challenges facing Ireland in the current economic climate can be tackled through an inventive use of space and collaboration between

different organisations and disciplines. The overall consensus was that architecture needed to become more accessible. An idea of an ‘architecture shop’ was put forward. After the presentations, a spokesperson from Treasury Holdings offered the students an empty retail space on Spencer Dock in Dublin for the duration of ‘Innovation Dublin’ – the 10th to the 21st of November in which the students could create their ‘architecture shop’, hosting workshops, lectures and exhibitions from each university.

Parametric Tubing

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PAPER TUBE PROJECT. The Paper Tube Project is a project developed in the Dublin School of Architecture at the Dublin Institute of Technology by a research group investigating the implications of using computers in the process of architectural design. It was chosen to work with a simple, unassuming and widespread element that is the paper tube. In order to ‘inform’ the material, or to enable various and flexible spatial configurations,

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a special joint was developed that is at the conceptual heart of the project. The project is an example of parametric structure where during the design process all joints for the tubes are changing according to the changing geometry of the overall form. The ‘parameters’ affecting the change of the joint are the resulting angles between the tubes. The angles and position in space inform the joints how to adapt. The joint consists of two

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

simple easy to produce elements. Using a specific algorithm, it is possible to generate the necessary geometries to accommodate various angles and tubular elements of different lengths and diameters to produce a 3 dimensional structure. It is therefore possible to connect metal, aluminium, plastic, paper or bamboo tubes of random sizes that are ‘at hand’, salvaged or produced to specification. The ‘flat’ elements of the joint can be produced

using a CNC milling machine. To optimise this process the joint is designed so that only a single-sided cut is needed. Stage 1 of this project was to develop a system which could become a tool to actively support the design process. The piece shown in this exhibition was designed to test the capabilities of the system.

With Stage 1 complete, the plan is to use the system to produce architecturally significant pieces.

Jamie Conway, Niamh Chambers, Declan Crowley, Emma Forristal

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The Teahouse

THE TEAHOUSE.

This was conceived in response to the studio furniture project. The program for the brief was open and the concept was to take the existing empty studio space and create or define a sub-space on a human scale therein. It was stipulated that the spaces be fabricated from plywood and be used to display drawings and support and store models. The final design derives from the maximum dimension of a plywood sheet (2440mm). The deck is comprised of members at full length, supported by four structural walls of height 2440mm. The outer walls (of the same dimension) are elevated to +660mm to form a balustrade on the upper level. One member is truncated to

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

form an entrance to the interior. The outer passageway denies the user direct access to the inner space and forms a spatial threshold which contains the Tea Station at the end. Through the internal walls, one enters into the internal volume which contains a stair to the upper deck. Conceptually the structure is comprised of a cube within another larger cube. The whole inside of the structure is then lined in butter paper so as to provide spacial autonomy inside and sculptural qualities on the outside, as well as giving the surface a unique animated appearance at night. The intention would be to provide internal lighting and audio to create a unique sensory experience within.

Essay - Mediated Matter

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‘The virtual is real but not actual, ideal but never abstract…the real-actual and the virtual-imaginary are not distinct halves but something akin to oscillating forces in a shifting field, existing not side by side but through and across each other. … If they are entities at all, they share functions and space over coterminous territories, or overlapping regions of non-exclusivity.’

Peter Zellner. (1999)

Fig. 5.30 N2: Central Communication space. O’Brien, D (2010) Photograph © Dianna Snape.

Contemporary concerns with surface are already positioned beyond the traditional view that wall and surface are somehow in opposition to each other, that the latter is essentially decorative and therefore separate from the space defining potential of the substrate and the structure. According to historian Andrew Benjamin, architecture becomes the work of matter when the surface is incorporated into “a material event, being the moment at which geometry, programme and the work of materials are interconnected”.¹ For Karl Bötticher, “wall does not have a tectonic dimension as an addition: it is tectonic from the start…..

Art–form and decoration cannot be separated.”²

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Fig. 5.27 Jon McCormack Eden (2004)

In a post-digital world, the purported dialectic between real and virtual has been added to this discourse. At the end of the twentieth century, Peter Zellner published the first significant anthology of digital architecture, entitled Hybrid Space, which included the early work of Kas Oosterhuis, Marcos Novak, Greg Lynn and Lars Spuybroek. Although the physical manifestations of this work have been less than convincing, the theory remains relevant. In his text, Zellner argued the realms of the virtual and physical as coterminous territories which are not separate, but are woven together and through one another. Zellner wrote of Oosterhuis that, in his digital work, he views architecture as

and intensity are digitally controlled as slow fades, rapid pulses or anything in between.

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

Darragh O’Brien

Fig 5.46 abstraction of information into lighting visualisations. Photograph ©Darragh O’Brien 2010

Fig 5.46 abstraction of information into lighting visualisations. Photograph ©Darragh O’Brien 2010

These digital beings rely on human presence for their very “an evolving, technologically enhanced means of organizing survival. We and they learn from each other. Projected onto sophisticated spatial data and programming information into intersecting translucent planes, this physical/virtual community structured mediums that synthesize complex geometries and In emphasising ambience, we sought a high level of abstraction for the information. Awareness of plays over the adjacent surfaces of the host space. aspects of human nature. These ‘body-buildings’ embody behavioural rules that are derived from the integration of form the transaction comes gradually over time, with repeated exposure to the media signifiers. In this Concepts such as ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence and information.”³ are also exerting an influence on how new technologies way, we come to understand that a relationship exists between us and our environment; that we and materials are integrated in contemporary constructed By their nature, electronic media are fluid and mutable with the environments. In essence, these approaches act in a way that capacity to change their structure and meaning in response to is the diametrical opposite of computer-generated simulation have a mutual, transformative impact on each other. their environment, user action, incoming data or other factors. associated with virtual reality, focusing on the development of Yet digital content - informative or artistic - is often screen based, physical experiences and spaces filled with digital information perceived as an accessory to surface, even in those very cultural through the pursuit of the thorough integration of computing with institutions where it is now anticipated as part of the environment.

N2’s organism is a result of a complex system of interactions, mixing indexed visual response, human, material and social factors.

Artists such as Jon McCormack, Bill Viola and James Turrell, controlled visual composition, and independent algorithms. Developed within the visualisation A basic assumption of ambient intelligence, or ‘calm technology’ on the other hand, have managed to construct immersive as termed by Marc Weiser, is that the interaction between a environments where media is not framed and the physical and software are four independent catalysts, each with its own set of attributes that govern its human subject and their networked environment functions virtual (here and there) co-exist in intertwined symbiosis. through the peripheral awareness of impressions that are McCormack’s Eden is an immersive, physical environment movement across the digital model. Each is also indexed to a particular section of the interior (four registered and processed at a subconscious level, ‘without where populations of evolving creatures move about, emit and listen to sounds, forage for food, encounter predators and mate with each other. Over time, these creatures evolve fitness to the landscape. Visitors influence the emergent open-ended nature of artificial evolution as the boundaries between real and virtual spaces are occupied.

concentrating on them’. � When considered in this way, data flow is the basis of the interaction. Cultural, economic and political capacities combine within a network of communication, making up what Castells refers to as a ‘space of flows’ over twenty years ago. �

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Figure 5.48. N2 Visualisation Tools—Digital Model and Catalyst Detail. Illumination of LEDs is caused by contact with catalysts (shown as coloured circles) Image Copyright: Collins, Hwang and O’Brien.2011

My own recent work has emerged from a series of transactions across two distinct axes. The first involves a coalescence of Physical (expressed primarily through experimentation with Form) and Virtual (emphasised through the absent presence of digital media) properties. The second axis involves the actualisation of theory, guided by collaborative, practice-based research. I work with media artists to challenge a form of linear architectural practice that seeks to impose, define and separate.

Conventionally, surface is understood to define space, but I am also interested in the possibilities of surface as recipient of space; a generative system that is continuously oscillating back and forth. The N2 project was the first in a series of prototypical learning environments to be developed at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia. In this particular space, art & technology are embedded in an effort to explore conscious and subconscious relationships between occupants and the digitally encoded elements within the space.

In addition to the conventional systems that allow occupants to manipulate environmental conditions such as light, air and sound, this project includes a suspended screen that responds to occupant activity within the space. This central screen was conceived as a complex, layered and mediated surface which changes colour through sensor operated LED arrays embedded within its layers. This 8m x 2m articulated aluminium surface, whilst functioning as whiteboard and projection surface can also be reconfigured to physically define distinct spaces.

The work draws from the metaphor of a ‘media-organism’, where a generative system is used to combine and manipulate LED arrays within the surface of the screen. Light, pattern and colour change in direct response to staff and student activity levels. Seen from outside, the intensity of colour indicates

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levels of activity inside, while the hue announces which territory is primarily occupied. Using current LED lighting technology a dynamic range of colour, and shifts in coloration and intensity are digitally controlled as slow fades, rapid pulses or anything in between.

In emphasising ambience, we sought a high level of abstraction for the information. Awareness of the transaction comes gradually over time, with repeated exposure to the media signifiers. In this way, we come to understand that a relationship exists between us and our environment; that we have a mutual, transformative impact on each other.

N2’s organism is a result of a complex system of interactions, mixing indexed visual response, controlled visual composition, and independent algorithms. Developed within the visualisation software are four independent catalysts, each with its own set of attributes that govern its movement across the digital model.

Each is also indexed to a particular section of the interior (four primary activity zones—four objects). Sustained noise in a section of the physical interior increases the size of the relevant catalyst, thus interacting with a broader area of virtual LEDs. Ellipse size increases in response to louder volumes, effectively feeding the organism. A drop off in activity and subsequent noise levels, leads to a slow decay of light. In an empty space, the entire organism enters a state of temporary stasis until renewed activity nourishes it once again.

Finally, as part of a strategy that reunites art & science in the production of performative architectural space, data gathered from UWB sensors is used to generate activity maps of the transactions that occur between the occupants and their environment. These maps form a single strand among bundled techniques used to study the nature of complex human experience. The same Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) that make such interfaces with digital media possible

Fig.5.50 Prototyping the Media Organism.

In response, it may be argued that clear distinctions are no longer necessary. One condition does not Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

need to be sacrificed for the benefit of the other. Through coterminous transactivity, we move

In response, it may be argued that clear distinctions are no can also overturn the formal coordinates of the physical longer necessary. One condition does not need to be sacrificed environment; Toyo Ito contends that form no longer reflects between physical and virtual (true/false), experiencing each from the position of the other, for the benefit of the other. Through coterminous transactivity, inner mechanisms, but rather abstract processes of use and � we move between physical and virtual (true/false), experiencing The proliferation of mediated surfaces therefore experience. becoming more aware of their intertwined relationships. In this realm of simultaneous occupation, each from the position of the other, becoming more aware of raises significant social, environmental and architectural issues their intertwined relationships. In this realm of simultaneous about the trans-substantiation of the virtual and the real.

Take we are momentarily free. occupation, we are momentarily free.

New York’s Times Square as an extreme example. Media art and advertising have been hybridized and the spectacle of noise and The integration of digital media will undoubtedly continue to light is extraordinary, so much so that natural light can no longer The integration of digital media will undoubtedly continue to transform the material qualities of the transform the material qualities of the city and architecture will penetrate into the building interiors. As a consequence, many become mutable. Our technologies, however, have always buildings are now vacant because it is more lucrative to lease city and architecture will become mutable. Our technologies, however, have always defined the defined the limitations of our capabilities and in-turn the shape of the buildings as media armatures than as places of occupation. our societies. It will be no different in a postdigital age. We simply This is Baudrillard’s simulacra; a condition that “threatens the have a new material to work with. limitations of our capabilities and in turn the shape of our societies. It will be no different in a post difference between true and false”.

digital age. We simply have a new material to work with.

Fig. 5.52. New York 2007 – Times Square ©Darragh O’Brien

Fig. 5.52. New York 2007 – Times Square ©Darragh O’Brien

6 Prestinenza Puglisi, L. 1999:19. Hyper architecture : spaces in the electronic age. Birkhauser Basel.

1. Benjamin A (2004:343) “Notes on the Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper” in Spuybroek (2004) “NOX Machining Architecture” London: Thames & Hudson.

2. ibid P.346 3. Zellner P (1999) “Hybrid Space (new forms in digital architecture)”. London. Thames and Hudson.

4. Eisenbrand, J and Von Vegesack, A. (2006: 140) , in Gerhard Selimann and Werner Lippert (eds.), Entry Paradise — New Worlds of Design (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser, 2006).

5. Castells, Manuel. The informational city : information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process. (Blackwell, Cambridge Oxford, 1989).

6. Prestinenza Puglisi, L. 1999:19. Hyper architecture : spaces in the electronic age. Birkhauser- Basel.

Essay - Toward a Visceral Architecture

…….designing out the down side. It is 2012, the bees that 25% of the food we eat depends on for pollination are in decline, seven billion people now inhabit the planet, a football field area of rain forest is eviscerated every second and every major life system is in decline. Is this due to an environmental crisis or a design one ?Is architecture, and its ethics or lack thereof, accomplice or witness ?

It has been clear for 25 years that the very preconditions for our work as architects, the environment into which our buildings are woven, the societal and cultural networks that give them value and meaning, the resource pool that feeds and fuels them have been in a state of radical change, and yet for the majority of architects, our way of thinking about buildings and architecture, is exactly the same as its always been; we create objects not systems, artefacts not facilities. We see our work largely as an artistic expression for us, and our buildings are always the exception, the special. Few of us dream of making a good ordinary building. We choose materials that are, and we know are more, damaging than others, and design building for their appearance even if at the expense of how they are resourced.

No matter how modest the brief, we innovate expensively and laud ourselves for it. If we think about it at all, we justify this by saying we are no worse than other professions and consumers, and that we are adding value in other ways.

Most damningly, the majority of the work of the majority of architects is simply not relevant to the issues and pressures of today; social and demographic upheaval, local impacts of climate change, energy security, exportation of manufacturing capacity, health issues and toxicity. Rooting building in its region through an architecture that places importance the harvesting of ambient renewables and the use of simple local materials that is critical, yet our designs could be dropped into any context or setting in the world and ‘work’ in the narrow definition we accept in high architecture circles.

We’ve been designing things with the wrong indicators of success for too long and our design metaphors are irrelevant to the world as it is. The values of transparency, seamlessness, being aerodynamic etc. We so often trot out, refer more to the aesthetic of the Hi-fi, the aeroplane, the mobile phone than to the more visceral and palpable challenges (gravity, metabolism, shelter) that architecture faces.

Even as cultural objects (if nature has any influence on culture and society and I believe it has a deep one), our creations are often obtuse. Its as if we are designing ever more beautiful filing cabinets as the world heads for cloud computing.

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And it is utterly beside the point whether it is lack of vision, ethics, grace or guile that has led our profession and the output of our creativity to be where we are now, teetering on the brink of irrelevance to the worlds problems, we urgently need to be elsewhere doing something different. If there is an ‘ethical’ question at all it is why do we define the ‘good’ design that we fight like hell for as being original, bespoke, not repetitious or pastiche rather than something related to the challenges facing our very survival as a species and making that into a high art form.

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It is time for a mid course correction, for us to accept that we as architects have a destructive affect on nature, and that we can create profoundly better designs than we have been, to evolve an architecture that redresses the multiplicity of dearths and deficits simultaneously.

Firstly we need to stop differentiating between sustainable design and non sustainable design. We no longer have the luxury of creating buildings that are not performing at the highest level possible environmentally (and every other way). No one speaks of modern and non modern architecture and hasn’t done so in 30 years. Just as the very trends and developments that heralded the arrival of modernism as a design departure (factory production, industrial materials, consumer choice) became integral to society leading to the assimilation of the modernist maverick, advances in science, simulation and the emergence of a green economy are moving sustainability from alternative and optional to being core.

Architects are uniquely placed to lead this. Some of the more inspiring maxims of sustainable design (paraphrased below)of late illustrate how; The adage that In protecting the environment, the filters of the future will be in our heads not in our pipes and chimneys*, show how the vision and tenacity that is core to our skill set will be invaluable in realizing this new design approach. The maxim that we can displace energy with ingenuity*further testifies to this opportunity, and duty. Lastly and post portentously, Stewart Brand,in reflecting perhaps on our unique position and responsibility on being invited to take an existing site (a piece of real or potential nature), pass it through our design process and create a new environment which will be the strongest influence on its users, inhabitant and nature for generations observes we are “as Gods and might as well get good at it”.

Secondly we need to let go of the false superiority that dictates that somehow sustainable buildings are not as aesthetically pleasing as non-sustainable ones, and start applying our efforts to both understanding why they are as they are and improving their clarity, legibility and proportion where necessary. The truth is we have no more of an idea of what a building of the future should look, than we did the satellite or windsurfer before they appeared in the last century or how sail powered truck, solar bicycle, or vertical farm may look in this one.

Some reflection on how we bestow approval on one set of constructional compositions over another is due here. We deem a contemporary building beautiful partly because we understand the argument it is making and the references it imbues or eschews and partly I believe because it uses motifs and forms that connect us to arenas of design that seem more uplifting and dynamic than the making of buildings. One thinks of the common aesthetic of some award winning buildings and IPods, consoles, vehicles. To fairly evaluate the aesthetics of a green building one would need to be able to read its impact on nature and natures influence on it, and few of us have sufficient literacy (innate understanding of nature systems) to do so as comprehensively as we can read a contemporary building and ‘get’ its argument.

So then, what should we design, How should we now make architecture ?

Brian T. O’Brien Perhaps we need to look out to the world of design beyond architecture for clues. That world is a very exciting place. Trends and movements such as BioMimicry (taking nature as model, mentor and measure in how we re-envisage everything from a train to a thumb tack), Cradle to Cradle (where products are designed to suit the cycle, natural or technical, that they belong in, have a 2nd subsequent use and where upcycling replaces the current downcycling wastefulness of everyday products) to name only two are seminal. One also thinks of Dyson and Steve Jobs in their unwillingness to be governed by past rules of how an object should look, feel and operate and Papaneks thoughts on the duties and opportunities of design. The Slow food movements where provenance of material and reverence for terroirregulate every decision also points to inspirations for a new architecture.

In my opinion the most important clues though for how to evolve an architecture of the future can be borrowed from John Thakarawho, writing about the world of information technology in society,encompasses the most important insights in the simple suggestion that;design should come from deep context, not high concept.

Cutting to the chase, we must contribute to the emergence of an architecture that not only does no harm, but that make a place or condition better and that evolves a theory of aesthetics grounded in eco-literacy—an understanding and dramatization of nature systems. Anything less is irrelevant at best.

It starts with a new end in mind, the creation of comfortable spaces and settings that use as little resources as possible, that run on ambient not fossil resources (energy, water food), that replenish and restore their context and that express themselves radiantly.

We must re-envision architecture such that buildings are systems,generators and habitats as much as structures.

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular and benign. New forms will occur, over storeys of roof to increase collecting areas (of rainwater, of sunlight for energy), high elements to allow gravity be utilised in place of electrical (pump) power. Above all buildings must become more concerned with food production. Building Integrated agriculture is now a recognised issue for architects to grapple with.

As generator, there is huge opportunity to have our buildings become positive in every aspect. No longer inert structures,buildings will now produce energy and sell it to the grid (or store the energy of nearby parked electric vehicles for a fee). They will produce oxygen and assimilate Co2 through living elements (and Co2 abatement has financial value). They will harvest rainwater and produce food. They will generate money.

So which of the many versions of sustainability should we follow ? There are many competing dogmas but being architects and concerning ourselves with the physical, the only plausible approach is to ground ourselves in the simple physical rules of nature (materials cycle-and must be kept unadulterated, energy flows, light becomes heat, warm air rises etc.) and use the Precautionary Principle as measure i.e. we learn from nature and don’t stray far from it. And we must remember we are building for the long haul. We should build now as we think will be proven to have been necessary in 100 years time.

We must have enough humility to accept that architecture isn’t always about architects. Indeed many of the cultural memes most prevalent now involve design issues where architects are not on stage at all. Slowness as in Slow Food and Slow cities is one (indeed Slow Architecture is already emerging as a movement itself), notions of Undesigning (an open source counter orthodox approach to collaborative design) and WabiSabi(the acceptance of an imperfect beauty in materials and objects as they age and acquire patina) can all inform the evolution of a future facing, visceral perhaps, architecture.

As systems building must operate both as anatomy and metabolism responding to natures rules. Anatomically the potential is rich; fabric and mass composed (mostly on plan) to perform as heat store, or moisture regulator, form composed (mostly in section) to admit light,channel air, adjust sunbeams and skin detailed to temper exposure, collect water harness solar energy. The easy pickings of sustainability are in using these architectonics to reduce resource needs and create comfort with -no moving parts.

So finally what should architecture school do?

As metabolism, architecture must make the throughput and conversion of energy, food, water and consumer goods manifest

In short, the world needs an architecture that creates buildings that feed, fuel heal and teach themselves and needs schools that are dedicated to defining and evolving it.

In 2009 Mike Haslam and myself informally circulated a proposal that the Dublin School of Architecture re-orientate itself entirely toward environmental sustainability and proposed 10 eComandments to guide that evolution.

The school today is in far better shape to make such a shift and I hope that it does.

* these quotes by unattributed but seminal ecological design thinkers.

Career Path

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Experiencing Erasmus - Anna Corbetta

In recent years the Erasmus programme has become increasingly important in most universities around the world. A few days ago, I was reading an article in the paper that said firms are now looking for students who went on Erasmus as opposed to those that graduate with an honours degree. In fact, the Erasmus can be considered an alternative academic education to the traditional one; what I mean by this is that it provides an enriched understanding of architecture and architectural education, a different perspective on teaching methods and a shift in what is considered important in architecture the Erasmus programme connects students from different schools and allows a closer look at the changes taking place in big cities and in the culture of a country.

The choice to come to DIT for my Erasmus was first determined by the language, though people had told me the Irish accent was very hard to understand! English is now the most important language, as everyone knows, and its important to have English as it helps with job prospects, even at home in Italy. My second reason for choosing DIT was that I wanted to go to a technologically advanced university.

As an Erasmus student, I found many differences between DIT and my college. First of all the size of the college. In my collage there are 300 students in each year just in the Faculty of Architecture and there are six different studios within which different types of projects are carried out. So its more spread out and not as intimate as DIT. It was comfortable to find a class that you could consider a big group of friends. Each of the twelve Erasmus students, were welcomed with curiosity and interest both by the professors and by the students. I did not take this positive response for granted, I greatly appreciated it. Many of my friends who went on Erasmus found problems in dealing with the locals, I think I received what’s known as an Irish welcome!

So for us it was really pleasant and delightful to find this kind of atmosphere.

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I arrived one week late so I missed the first week long project.

When I walked into the studio on my first day, it was quite a weird experience. It was full of hand made furniture and everybody was using electric saws, nails and hammers. I was both excited and surprised by what I saw on my first day. I was excited by it because at home, we very rarely realise the design process by making it!. I believe that it is something an architect should try to do more often, something architectural students should definitely do at least once every year.

Also, the development of the architectural projects during the year was held in a different way. The approaches of professors were very friendly and open to different points of view regarding architecture. You feel more free to explain your ideas and your project and you don’t feel like you are being judged on a personal level. Every tutor I dealt with in DIT was willing to listen to me for as long as necessary, physically draw details in a one to one desk crit and even go as far as to lend me their precious texts!

This open environment that seems almost exclusively Irish, was a great environment for both learning and living in.

Finally, living in Dublin was a very pleasant time for me because it is not a very big city, it is definitely on a human scale. You can move easily by bike and by foot without problem, reaching different points of the city in a short time. I loved the fact that the city centre is always alive no matter what time of the day it is. For example, in Temple Bar you can come and go at any time. Dublin really is a city that I could call home after just a year of living in it, the people embraced me as though I was their own.

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

4th Year Publication

PORTUGAL LISBON PORTO

SPAIN MADRID TOLEDO

CHICAGO

UNITED STATES

ITALY

PORTUGAL

SCOTLAND

GERMANY

SWITZERLAND

DENMARK

EDINBURGH GLASGOW

BERLIN MUNICH

MILAN BELLINZONA VICENZA COMO

ZURICH

LISBON PORTO

COPENHAGEN

Class Trip - 4th Year

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Potugal Trip- Lisbon/Porto. By visiting places and experiencing them with one’s own body and mind, we gain an understanding for space that cannot be reproduced by other means. There are certain limitations to examining spaces through drawings and studying photographs of physical models.

In contrast, a true phenomenological experience offers a rich learning outcome and makes a study expedition a unique and valuable element in the academic year. On March 13th, 2011

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the fourth year students of architecture from the Dublin School of Architecture, DIT, went on a study trip to the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto. Each city has an interesting relationship with the coastline and many noted contemporary projects can be seen in both. The tour allowed the students and staff members to indulge in Portugal’s culture by walking its streets, eating the food and interacting with local people.

Lisbon, Porto

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Class Trip - 4th Year

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Michael Warren Exhibition

MICHAEL WARREN - VISUAL, CARLOW A major exhibition comprising both new and selected retrospective work by the renowned Irish sculptor Michael Warren took place in VISUAL, Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, in September 2010.

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Curricular

Entitled Unbroken Line, the project brought together Warren’s life ideas and concepts. The multi-part instillation included works from an impressive career spanning over 40 years. Fourth year architects were fortunate to meet the artist and be given a personal tour of the exhibition.

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Venice

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E A S A - European Architecture Students Assembly

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Every year since 1981, hundreds of European students of architecture have gathered each summer to discuss and work with architecture, student to student. These summer-schools are organised by EASA (European Architecture Students Assembly) and happen in a new place and with a specific theme for each year.

During the two weeks of the assembly, visions and experiments grow from workshops, tutored and arranged by architecture students. It is an important and inspiring gathering, with a scope that extends beyond the 400 participants and organisers.

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Anyone who has ever attended an EASA summer-school will have stories to tell about architecture, friendship and new ideas.

IDENTITY. EASA is an international young architects network which, in collaboration with professional architects and artists, investigates today’s architecture, city and technology. It is a communication platform for the exchange of ideas, experiences and reflections, the starting point for interactions in the city field.

THE EASA NETWORK. Apart from the annual meeting, EASA supports the international communication and exchange

Architecture and Urbanism EASA

network through it’s representatives in every country (National Contact/ N.C.). The representatives—2 for each country— communicate with each other during the whole year and meet every November, for one week [(National Contact Meeting) in a different country. During these meetings the results from the latest summer meeting are being discussed, and the proposal for the next meeting is being chosen. HISTORY. EASA was founded in 1981 when architecture students from Liverpool invited their

fellow students from the rest of Europe to come and discuss architecture, proposing solutions for the problems of their city.

Approximately 300 young architects gathered, starting up with EASA’s collective institution “Starting Up the EASA Experience”, was the first theme of the congress. Since then, every year, European architects-students meet in a different city with the intention of exchanging ideas and views on architecture, as well as acting within the city itself.

Loggia Italy 2009

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LOGGIA.

In August of 2009, a student workshop in the European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA), located in Darfo, Northern Italy was undertaken by 4 students of the Dublin School of Architecture. Kieran Donnellan, Sean Attley, Kevin Kelly and Paul O’Brien were tutors, and the workshop group consisted of 30 students. The theme was supermARCHet, concerning branding in architecture and its negative effects on

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Italian cities. The team responded by re-interpreting the medieval Italian meeting/market place typology of the ‘Loggia dei Mercanti’.

A prototype was created, which like the typology was based on a series of rules giving it the flexibility to respond to many sites.

Loggia is not simply a realisation of a system of rules. It is about the establishment of patterns and the addition of eccentricities to break them. Pattern and eccentricity are inseparable.

Sound Booth England 2010

The aim of this workshop was to identify the unique acoustic properties of the city, by mapping the sounds of the city and the enclosing spaces. The material collected was housed in a pavilion in the heart of Manchester for the public to engage with. Upon entering the sound insulated pavilion, the first two

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rooms disconnect the user from their context by removing all light and sound. The third room was lit with touch sensitive, wall mounted lights. As the user pressed and turned off the lights, more recordings of the city would flood the room until the user was emerged in sound and darkness.

Syn∙TACTICS Engand 2010

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Architecture and Urbanism EASA

Syn∙TACTICS is a platform for exploration, experimentation

and expression. In architecture, the building is seen as an envelope in which openings allow a selective view of the city.

This is a common Scenario in which choice aspects of the city are selectively viewed. We argue that the visuals defining a place can’t be this selective. The adaptation of an existing building sees it expressed as a platform from which the city of Manchester can be experienced in a holistic way, presenting an ideological view of what defines the identity of the city. Experimentation bridges the divide between what we have explored and what we wish

to present. Transforming the experience into an artistic vision. A work of art to an artist is a personal thing, and the way we react to it is a form of interpretation. The same can be said of a city.

The way we respond to the city is based on the experiences we have of it; both the physical and metaphysical. Our Syn∙TACTIC is to explore and experiment with Manchester’s identity, its past industry and its present cultural manifestation. It aims to encourage outsiders to analyse a place in order to determine what it is that defines an identity. This then will be presented as a visual representation in one location.

A Temporary Monument Engand 2010

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THE TEMPORARY MONUMENT. A vast plain of emptiness, nothingness, surrounded by bits and pieces of Manchester: debris of a fractured identity. Can one truly grasp the nature of a city so full of paradoxes? Can light be shed on a place defined by a rapid accumulation of events and ideas?

The soul of a monument lies in the fixation of a shared ideology.

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The symbolic presence of the intervention, however, relies on the opposite: the metropolis inhabitants’ constant flux of thought and opinion. The clear shape suggests a notion of the ceremonial which is contrary to the asymmetrical shift of the columns, inducing a certain informality. The wrapped beam structure suggests mass, but is in fact empty.

Bird Watching Shelter Ireland 2008

BIRD WATCHING SHELTER.

The workshop focused on straw bale construction techniques and dealt with building in a rural landscape. The building frames a view over the surrounding

Architecture and Urbanism EASA

fields, which were in the process of being re-seeded and making it a good location for bird watching. The site was located off a popular walking route in Letterfrack and nestles neatly into its topography.

Staff

1st Year

2nd Year

Allen, Cormac Bakkala, Christopher Bergin, Darren Best, Stephen Bone, Amanda Bourke, Sinead Boyd, Dermot Boyer, Jennifer Brady, Noel Buggy, Gavin Burns, Collette Casey, Alice Cleary, Johanna Comerford, Philip Crean, Máire Crowley, Peter Duffy, Francis Noel Duggan, Catriona Fahy, Pierce Flynn, Patrick Geoghegan, Emma Gutierrez-Salgado, Raul Hanly, Orna Harrington, Patrick Harty, Laura Haslam, Michael Hayes, Emma Hickey, Donal Horan, James Kelly, Paul Kennihan, Ryan Knight, David Lamb, Helen Larkin, Steve Lauder, John Maher, Tom McCarthy, John McGuinness, Simon Mathews, Malachy Naidoo, Jadel O’Brien, Brian O’Brien, Gerry O’Callaghan, Orla O’Rourke, Andrew O’Sullivan, Lenzie Ozmin, Janek Palmer, David Prunty, Catherine Rashied, Magdi Roche, Jim Rouholamin, Sima Scullion, Declan Sheridan, Sarah Solon, Bernadette Spillane, Martin Stevens, Dominic Tierney, Paul Walker, Jonathan Walls, Ethna Ward, Brian Wojcik, Marcin Wright, David

Jaroslaw Adamczuk Marie-Claire Bligh Conor Bourke Nevan Buckley John Calter Alice Clarke George Cooney Hannah Crehan Niamh Denny Aidan Devlin Amandine Di Ciaccio William Durkan Sophie El Nimr Claire Fitzpatrick Graham Flaherty Jamie Flynn Eva Lena Hemmingsson Nigel Holmes Wayne Holmes Ryan Hughes Lelde Jansone Rebecca Kelly Shaunagh Keogan Aaron Kirk Carl Laffan Ronan Lonergan Rebecca Mangan Gillian Mc Allen David Mc Andrew Tommy Mc Cormack Stephen Mc Gettigan Killian Mc Loughlin Thomas Mc Phillips Thomas Moore Suzanne Mullally Ciara Murnane Andrew Murphy Claudia Murray Etain Neary Katie Nicholson Daire Nolan Donnacha O’Connell Shelly-Ann O’Dea Orla O’Donnell Silvia Paiva Adam Purcell Darren Richardson Kate Rushe Ciaran Sheridan David Smith Andrew Sterritt Colin Sweeney Ailbhe Walsh Matthew Walsh Matthew Webb Katie Wolahan Jack Worrall

Mark Bailey-Smith Kate Buck Eanna Byrne Enda Cahill Anne Canavan Laura Carroll Katie Corcoran Kenna Ailbhe Cunningham Aoife Cunningham Brendan Daly Mark Davy Deirdre Doyle Declan Duffy Max Fedorov Niall Fitzgerald James Hanlon John Hanrahan Rachael Haskins Peter Hogan Ronan Keane Sophie Kelliher Daire Kelly Oksana Korotkova Oksana Lastovetsky David Lawless Orla Lawn Mark Mc Cormack Daniel Mc Fadden Eoghan Mc Kendry Julie Molloy Ciaran Molumby Davina Moody Fiona Muldowney Dean Murphy Eoin Murphy Cormac Murray Hugh Neary Susie Newman Caisin Nia An Bheatha Vincent O’Byrne Eoin O’Donnell Christopher O’Keeffe Finnian O’Neill Alison O’Reilly Sebastia Pertl Stephen Richardson Donal Ryan Conor Sheehan Brendan Spierin Cillian Wright

3rd Year

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5th Year

David P. Aitken Alan Attride Timothy Bergin Morgan Boland Andries Burger David Burke Fiona Canavan Peter Carroll Peter Caulfield Aisling Cleary Miriam Corcoran Sinead Delaney Kevin Doherty Michael Drury Jennifer Duffy Paul Egan Caren Finnegan Nicholas Hegarty Cian Hughes Oisin Jacob David Keegan Nadine Kelly Anna Keogh David Lally Craig Leavy Niall Lennon Robert Mannion Ross McCarthy Sophie McCauley Ruth McElroy David McGowan Sinead McLoughlin John Meehan Grace Mullen Kevin Nolan Kacie O’Dea Aidan O’Shea Shane Phelan Mark Poland Garvan Reilly Ciara Ryan Kieran Ryan Natalie Scanlon Alan Sherlock Colum Smith Philip Tennyson Kenneth Tuite Georgina Vernon Cliodhna Walsh

Sarah Baranowski Klara Bindl Bernard N. Brennan James R. Browne Ciaran J. Byrne Eoin Byrne Margaux Calvet Amy Catsinas Niamh Chambers Robert Chapman Kevin Coffey Jamie Conway Anna Corbetta Declan Crowley Josephine Flahive Emma Forristal Donnchadha Gallagher Luke Gleeson Simon Harrington Edwyn J. Hickey Olivia Hillery Niall Howard Ruth Hynes Boris Ikeda David Ivers Brian Jordan Jan Kaplan Laura Kenny Claire Kilty Maria B. Larkin Bryan Ledger Nicole Maass Paul Maher Sophia Martinez Courtney Mc Donnell Daniela Mest Shane A. Morgan Grainne Ni Chuanachain David O’Brien Mary O’Brien Alen O’Farrell Saran H O’Rourke James M. O’Toole Anna Pierce Egle Pruckute Michele Realis Luc Jimmy Roelofs Adrian Rooney Emmet Smith Elaine Wynne

Wendy S. Adams Sean Attley David P. Bradshaw Nilfa Burke Stephen Bushell Teresa Carro Dominiquez Laoise Casey Thomas Comerford Helen-Rose Condon Conor Coughlan Rachel Cribbin Louise M. Dwyer Ronan Gallagher Elizabeth Gaynor Paul Geoghegan Breffni Greene Andrew Guerin Niall Kane Alan J. Kavanagh Aisling M. Kehoe Kevin Kelly Ina Kennedy Mark R. Keogh Philip Lambkin Jonathan Loewen Caoimhe Loftus Leanne Martin Aoife Mc Ateer Emer Mc Cabe Luke Mc Call Dualta Mc Cormack Jones Brian Mc Elroy Maire Mc Guinness Kevin Mc Kevitt Laura Moloney Anna Monaghan Stephen Murphy Ronan Murray Derek Naughton Claire Nolan Cormac Nolan Paul O’Brien Patrick O’Connor Michael O’Dell Conor Horgan Cian O’Shea Paul O’Sullivan Gavin Phelan Olivia Rusk Gareth Ryan Irene Walsh Kenny Ward