Níall McLaughlin
Architects

AIAUK 2021 DESIGN AWARDS WINNER

JUNE 2021

Magdalene College Library has won in the Professional Practice Medium Sized Projects category at this year’s AIAUK Design Awards. For over 20 years, The American Institute of Architects UK Chapter Excellence in Design Awards programme has proven highly valued by architects as they confer trans-Atlantic recognition for design excellence. Professional entries are sought from UK-based architects or designers, for projects anywhere in the world, and Architects or designers based outside the UK for projects completed in the UK.

Acknowledging that architecture is a corpus of inherited ideas, Alternative Histories invited more than 80 contemporary practices in the UK and Europe to imagine an exchange with architects from the past. Each office was assigned a different drawing from the collection of Drawing Matter. The architects were then tasked with making a model that not only responded to what they saw, but envisioned an alternative future for the original drawing while adhering to the constraints of the project.

NAZRIN SHAH BUILDING – STEELWORK

JULY 2015

Just over two years since our first tentative steps towards imagining what sort of space a new auditorium for Worcester College might possibly be like, we find ourselves enclosed within a spidery sketch, looking up to the trees through a skeletal enclosure of steel. We watched in excitement as our drawings were scribed across the site, first in neon spray paint and little red sticks, later excavated into deep ravines. We pick our way across the lines that had become so familiar on paper and are now concrete obstacles in a muddy field. The reality of this transition only became real as we stood looking across at the steel columns in this picture. They map out the positions of the stone fins that radiate around the curved facade of the new auditorium, with the sloping beams above us silhouetted against the bright July sky marking the future locations of the sculpted folds to the soffit.