AIAUK 2021 Design Awards Winner

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.

KEY NOTE LECTURE AT CONFERENCE ON MODERN SACRED ARCHITECTURE

OCTOBER 2014

Niall McLaughlin has given a keynote lecture on the theme of ‘Sacred Spaces’ as part of a conference on Modern Sacred Architecture in Ireland and Germany, hosted at Newman House in Dublin. The conference was hosted as a collaboration between University College Dublin, Goethe-Institut Ireland and the National College of Art and Design. The other key note lecturers were Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at UCD and Amandus Sattler, principal of the award-wining Munich practice, Allmann Sattler Wappner.

The three day event explored themes of abstraction and innovation, together with conservation and re-use in the design of churches, mosques and synagogues from 1920s to the present day. The lectures and panel discussions focussed on sacred architecture of the period within Ireland and Germany. Niall spoke on themes surrounding the practice’s ecclesiastical work, including the Bishop Edward King Chapel and the Carmelite chapels in London and Dublin.